Schmitt, Toni

ORAL HISTORY OF TONI SCHMITT
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
May 13, 2004
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Toni. Tell us a little bit about your family and your family’s background prior to Oak Ridge beginning in 1942. You were living in the area, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. Well, first of all, I was the fifth child of Benjamin Harrison Peters and Cleo Stair Peters. We lived across from the Magnet Mill. My father had always worked for newspapers, so when the mill started, they hired him to head the box department, so he made the boxes.
Mr. Kolb: In Clinton.
Mrs. Schmitt: In Clinton, and they made the boxes in Clinton for all the hosiery people all over, everywhere. Anyway, Oak Ridge at that time was a rural area and my mother’s sister, Lillian Stair Cassidy, owned the Peach Orchard, which is now still known as the Peach Orchard.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, up on West Outer Drive?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, off West Outer Drive. When I was a little girl, I picked peaches there for them, helped them harvest the peaches. Also in Clinton I had a music teacher and she taught me and she also taught Reba Holmberg who lives on Scenic Drive, I think. Okay, well we had the same piano teacher.
Mr. Kolb: Who was that?
Mrs. Schmitt: The teacher? Now Reba will remember the name of that teacher, but right now I can��t remember her name. She traveled around to the different homes. At that time, you didn’t go to her home; she came to your home. This area was a very rural area and they had a school, Robertsville, and I went to Clinton. We were competitive in basketball with this team, the kids from Robertsville. My dad was one of ten children, five boys and five girls. My dad’s father was Clerk and Master at the Courthouse in Clinton. I have no idea what the duties [were], but a very respected family. My mother was one of eight children, four boys and four girls. I’ve got so many cousins around here, it’s normal to run into two or three of them when I go out. But anyway, when I was in high school, I took subjects like shorthand, typing, bookkeeping, all clerical studies. The minute I graduated, I wanted to come to Oak Ridge and get a job, but I was only seventeen.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that?
Mrs. Schmitt: ’43. I was only seventeen years old, so I got a job in a law office in Clinton for lawyer Al Fox, and that was very interesting, the three months I spent there. But anyway, as soon as I was eighteen, which was September 10th in ’43, I came to Oak Ridge and I went up to the AEC Building. We called it the Castle on the Hill then, and Mr. LaSoure, because of my vast experience with the law –
Mr. Kolb: Three months
Mrs. Schmitt: Three months. He took me up to the legal section to be interviewed. Now this was some really interesting interview, because you must know that back then, we did not have television and the only time we heard anyone except East Tennessee people speak was on the radio, which you didn’t get a lot of different ethnic accents from the radio. So the man who was interviewing me was a Jewish man from New York City named Edward Diamond and during the interview he asked if I could take dictation and I said, “Yes I can.” So he said, “Do you have your pad?” And I said, “Yes I do.” So he dictated, but the problem was about every third word, I couldn’t understand what he said.
Mr. Kolb: His accent.
Mrs. Schmitt: Just couldn’t understand what he said at all, so I’d leave big blanks. Anyway I transcribed it, and when he read it, he leaned back in his chair and said, “Can you take dictation?” I said, “Yes sir.” “Can you type?” And I said, “Yes sir, and I can take dictation too.” I said, “I couldn’t understand a word you said.” He said, “I couldn’t understand a word you said either.” So anyway, he called Mr. LaSoure, and on the way back down to the personnel I kept saying, “I don’t have to work for him. I can work for anybody.”
Mr. Kolb: Except him.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, except him. So when we got down there, Mr. LaSoure said, “Mr. Diamond wants to know if you can start on Monday?” And I said, “He hired me?” I laughed. And he said, “Yes he did.”
Mr. Kolb: You worked for him?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, no, not exactly for him. I was assigned to Sergeant Glen Wiltrout, who incidentally is still alive, and I visited him last week, the week before Easter, in Washington, D.C. He lives in the district, still alive, and we had a wonderful talk last week. But anyway, I was assigned to Sergeant Wiltrout. After about a year, my boss, Sergeant Wiltrout, one day said, “Toni, have you ever wondered why when Mr. Diamond has company he always calls you to go get their coffee?” And I reflected on that and I said, “No, I have no idea.” He said, “He could call Polly or Bettie or Reba, but he always calls you. You never have wondered why?” And I said, “No.” He said, “He wants his visitors to hear how the natives speak.” Well that made me so mad, I was furious.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sake, like you were being made an example of.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and so I was very mad. A short time later, Mr. Diamond lost his secretary and he called me and he said, “Toni, how would you like to work for me?” Well at that time, Jim, I was young and stupid. Now I would say, “Absolutely,” but I said, “No sir.” Back then, we always used that phrase. That’s gone by the wayside now; it’s old fashioned. But I said, “No sir.” He said, “No sir!” I said, “No sir.” And he said, “Well, um, you realize that you’d be turning down a raise in pay and a raise in grade?” And I said, “Yes Sir.” And then he was sort of speechless. I don’t blame him [for] my stupidity at that time, but I said, “I’ll work for Mr. Sullivan though.” He was the Assistant Head of the Legal Section.
Mr. Kolb: And Diamond was the Head?
Mrs. Schmitt: Diamond was the Head. So I was assigned to Conrad Harrison Sullivan. But now I realize –
Mr. Kolb: Did you get along with Mr. Harrison?
Mrs. Schmitt: I got along with Mr. Diamond, too, except I was so upset with him when I thought he was just wanting people to hear how the natives speak. I was very sensitive about that then. Anyway, working up at the castle was great fun. I worked in the Legal Section. The Legal Section prepared all the contracts for all the different companies, and they always have a paragraph to scope of work. It was so vague that it was very odd, because when you got down to the scope of work, it would have what I call ‘Mickey Mouse speech’ and say the subcontractor would perform the work required to achieve the goal. It was all nothing, just nothing, nothing really. I have another interesting story about – not that I thought those were interesting – but I have a story my co-worker Bettie Coobs – do you know John Coobs, Jim?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mrs. Schmitt: He worked at X-10. Well anyway, Bettie was Mr. Diamond’s secretary. Bettie was very, very smart, and one day in general conversation Bettie said, “I think I know what they are making here.” And much to Mr. Diamond’s horror she said, “They’re going to split the atom and make a bomb out of it.” Later it was reported he just quaked in his boots, and after that meeting was over and Bettie had said that, he went to the higher ups and said, “My secretary has just said out in full language what we are doing here. I want you to come with a real tough security talk in a few days. Don’t come right today or tomorrow; she might know she’s right.” But anyway, the day that the bomb was announced was the day they were going to come talk to Bettie. So it all worked out; it was settled.
Mr. Kolb: This is late in the war.
Mrs. Schmitt: That was late in the war when she said that. But, Jim, I was disappointed that day, ’cause when we heard the news, I’m at work and I called Chuck, my husband, who knew what they were doing here due to his knowledge of it anyway. So I called Chuck, and instead of telling him they’ve announced that we are making bombs here and that they’ve made an announcement, I just said, “Chuck, you know what they’re making here? Atomic bombs.” Well he just hung up on me and I’m saying, “Chuck, Chuck…,” and he was gone. He thought, ‘She has,’ –
Mr. Kolb: You’d be in trouble.
Mrs. Schmitt: He just thought, ‘Oh gosh, they’ll be picking her up any minute now.’
Mr. Kolb: This is the day it was dropped?
Mrs. Schmitt: The day it was dropped and the news came out, and they hadn’t heard it at the plant yet. We had heard it up at the hill, and when I called him, I just said, “Chuck, you know what they’re making here?” I said, “Atomic bombs.” Oh, he just hung up.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he figured you were in trouble by you saying that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, yeah. Oh, he knew I was in trouble, big trouble.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s back up a little bit. You’ve gone all the way to the end of the war. Tell me about your living conditions when you first came to Oak Ridge. Where did you live and who did you live with and that kind of thing?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, when I came from Clinton at first I’d carpool with people but then –
Mr. Kolb: From Clinton?
Mrs. Schmitt: From Clinton, and of course when we got to the gate, the cars had to be searched ���cause there could be no – you had to have a badge to get in, you could not bring in liquor, you could not bring in cameras, and your car was searched, maybe not every day but periodically, so you had to be very careful. And there were signs all over: “Shhhh don’t tell anybody!” “Be quiet!” In other words, the only thing we could say was, “The grass is green and the sky is blue.” That’s about all we could say. But coming into Oak Ridge every morning was an experience, because you would come in one day and there would be a street with just bare land on it, and going home that night there’d be ten houses on it ’cause they went up. The cemesto – the people would come put the frame, they’d come slap the cemesto board and come with a roof, and they were doing a street a day. And all the streets back then were designed to be very short. They didn’t want any numbers of houses very high. And you know why that was?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mrs. Schmitt: They didn’t want people outside to think there was a lot of people here, so all the streets were short and they were all 110 to 120, and that was on purpose. Now some of them, a couple of them were higher, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well like West Outer, they had to be.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, but they tried to make it as small as they could.
Mr. Kolb: To cover up the number of people.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Now, there were three places to eat. You had three places you could eat, and they were all called ‘ptomaine taverns,’ because you were always getting the stomach virus.
Mr. Kolb: These were cafeterias?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, these three cafeterias: one in the East End, one in the West End, and the one in Central Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Near Jackson Square.
Mrs. Schmitt: Townsite. And they would do things like – those were huge places to eat and they would have all these people in there eating and on St. Patty’s Day you had green mashed potatoes which almost made you sick to look at it.
Mr. Kolb: Did you eat your breakfast and lunch and supper?
Mrs. Schmitt: If you ate out, you ate everything there ’cause that was all.
Mr. Kolb: But you probably ate your breakfast at home.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well I shortly moved into a dormitory. I moved into Bayonne Hall, and it was right across from that cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: In the East End?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, it was right across from the Castle. Right now it would be where the big Bechtel building is, the big building where Bechtel first started.
Mr. Kolb: Where SAIC is, on Lafayette Drive?
Mrs. Schmitt: No. It’s in Townsite behind the Blue Hound Grill. That big building.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Jackson Tower.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Well, that’s where there were three dormitories.
Mr. Kolb: That was gone when I came here.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, there were three dormitories. They had a big quad in front with grass, and people would sit, and Bayonne Hall was facing the road out there, and they had two sides.
Mr. Kolb: Were they all women’s dormitories?
Mrs. Schmitt: All women.
Mr. Kolb: So you were real close to Jackson Square?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and I would walk to the Castle. It was very interesting back then because the average age was so low.
Mr. Kolb: You were just eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and there were busloads of secretaries coming in here every day, a whole busload of women from eighteen to twenty-five or thirty; they were bringing them in from all over the place. Now, my husband was a New York City man.
Mr. Kolb: Right, and when did you meet and how?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, we met here at the tennis court. But I wanted to tell you a little bit about Chuck. He’d never been away from New York City and he had German parents who wanted him to never leave home and live with them forever.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Are you serious?
Mrs. Schmitt: Serious. He went to Queens College and when he graduated, they said, “Charlie, you do not have to leave home. If you will live with us, we will take care of you. You don’t have to worry about food or anything.”
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t want him to get married?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, no. They didn’t want him to leave home, even get a job. They didn’t even want him to get a job. So Chuck immediately got a job in a TNT plant in Ohio. But Chuck felt bad. The war was on, and after he got the job in the TNT plant, they wouldn’t let him – he wanted to join the Army, and they wouldn’t let him because he’s a valued employee. You see, making TNT. And so they –
Mr. Kolb: Chemical engineer, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. But he kept on begging them until they finally released him. He just wanted to go so bad.
Mr. Kolb: So he did join the Army.
Mrs. Schmitt: So he joined, volunteered, was put in the Chemical Warfare Corps in Alabama. So in Alabama, he trained with all these boys to go overseas. He went through basic training, a very stiff training. He is now at a port in New York City ready to go; he’s mentally and physically prepared.
Mr. Kolb: So he’s in the infantry?
Mrs. Schmitt: Chemical Warfare. So they call out two names before they get on the boat, Chuck Schmitt and Fred Worm, and they said, “You all are going to Knoxville, Tennessee.” Nobody ever said ‘Oak Ridge’ then. And they were given a piece of paper, and you know what I said a while ago, what they told them was, “Say nothing to anyone. The only thing you’re allowed to say is, ‘The sky is blue and the grass is green,’ and when you get to Knoxville, call this number.” So he was furious. Here he had given up a real good job to volunteer to go fight. Here he’s ready to get on the boat and he is called to come here.
Mr. Kolb: And he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
Mrs. Schmitt: And Tennessee, where in the world is Tennessee? That’s where they go barefoot and they live in shacks and have outhouses. So he moved in here. The first Saturday night he was here –
Mr. Kolb: What year was this now, when he moved in?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was in ’44. I met him in October 7th in ’44 at a Tennis Court dance.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Bill Pollock’s Tennis Court dance.
Mrs. Schmitt: A few days after he arrived, he went to that dance, and Bill Pollock had his Paul Jones and everybody made a circle, the women on the inside and the men on the outside. “Women go to your right when the music stops, men go to your left. Whoever you’re facing, dance with them.” So the first dance, I got Chuck, and the first thing he said to me was – I was pretty tall then – I’ve shrunk down now – he said, “I’m so happy to have a tall girl ’cause my knee doesn’t hit ’em in the stomach.” Not very romantic. The second thing he said was, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” I said, “Republican.” And that must have been the right answer.
Mr. Kolb: So you hit it off?
Mrs. Schmitt: We hit it off.
Mr. Kolb: Did his accent bother you much? I mean he’s from New York City.
Mrs. Schmitt: He couldn’t say anything. He put Rs in everything where it didn’t belong. He called oil “Earl.” And I had to educate him quite a bit.
Mr. Kolb: You changed him but he didn’t change you?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well he changed me a lot too. We were really good for each other. However, his mother and father were devastated because they didn’t even want him to leave home, so when he went to the war, the night before he left, he got his mother so drunk. They were up all night drinking. When Chuck went out the door, she said, “Bye Charlie,” and slumped over. But that wasn’t as nearly as unhappy as when she heard I was going to marry Chuck.
Mr. Kolb: Had she met you?
Mrs. Schmitt: No.
Mr. Kolb: Just the news that he was marrying a Tennessee girl.
Mrs. Schmitt: I take that back. She had met me. I forgot. I don’t think I was engaged; she didn’t know for sure he was going to marry me. But anyway, Chuck asked if I could go to New York on a visit, so I went, and they were terrible. They treated me terribly. Well, I had never – you know, in Tennessee you’ve got people like Jones, Brown, Smith, and they all like –
Mr. Kolb: Common folks.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, we didn’t have a variety of ethnic people, and I didn’t know that in German families, the man does no labor, absolutely none.
Mr. Kolb: Around the house you mean?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Oh, it’s a disgrace if they do. At least in Chuck’s thinking.
Mr. Kolb: Well, my family is German and my father had a big garden, I know that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, he never did do anything inside.
Mr. Kolb: Not housework.
Mrs. Schmitt: In fact, if you were even caught hanging something out on a clothesline it was a disgrace for your family. So from my background, where my father helped my mother do everything, it was a different world up there. Needless to say, they hated me with a passion, and I didn’t find out till about twenty-five years after I was married that they were not invited to my wedding nor told about it.
Mr. Kolb: So they weren’t there, obviously.
Mrs. Schmitt: They weren’t there.
Mr. Kolb: They wouldn’t have come if they had been.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, no, they would’ve come, but Chuck said – I said, “Chuck, I didn’t know you didn’t ask your mother and father. You told me they couldn’t come.” He said, “Toni, they would have come, and when the minister said, ‘Does anyone have any reason why these people…,’ my father would’ve gotten up and told all a bunch of stuff.” So he said, “I couldn’t tell ’em.”
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure; did Chuck meet your family before you got married?
Mrs. Schmitt: He met my family, and of course they’re from a different background. Chuck went to my father and asked for my hand, unbeknownst to me, traditional way, and my Daddy was a big joker and he said, the answer was, “Well Chuck, you can have her. She’s not good for anything. She can’t do anything.” And he was saying that playfully, because I adored my father and my father was a wonderful person.
Mr. Kolb: That was all right. They hit it off okay?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah. My family had no problem. My mother taught us when we were little to – she said, “Now, you be careful who you marry, because I’m gonna like anyone you do, so you make sure you like ’em, ��cause I’m gonna like ’em,” which was good psychology.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back a little bit to your single days. You said you lived with three, two or three other girls, or how many girls lived together in that dormitory room?
Mrs. Schmitt: Do you know that I cannot even remember how many. I think we at least had two beds and we each had a roommate. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: And you lived there several years before you met Chuck and married?
Mrs. Schmitt: I lived there from ’43 till I married Chuck at the Chapel on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: About a year. But those single days, single years, tell us about those before you met Chuck, I mean, what you did and the atmosphere.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, there was a flurry of activity all the way into Oak Ridge because they had a full-time recreation department and they planned – it was mainly dances and get-togethers but there was a regular dance schedule: on Wednesday nights, a Tennis Court dance, and Saturday night was a big dance at the Grove Recreation Hall and Sundays –
Mr. Kolb: Where the Oak Terrace used to be, that big room?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had –
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Terrace, do you remember the Oak Terrace?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. That’s where it was. And on Sunday night, it was at the Ridge Rec Hall, and that’s right down from Chapel on the Hill. I don’t know what’s there now.
Mr. Kolb: Well is that where the public library was for a while?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. But back then, it was just all a rec hall, and I had my wedding reception in one of the rooms.
Mr. Kolb: Other than dancing, did you do any other recreation? Bowling?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had bowling, and I didn’t participate in that. I always loved dancing, so I went to all the dances, and sometimes – I remember one night, they had a magician, well, a hypnotist. He hypnotized a bunch of people, and that was very interesting. But to be hypnotized, you have to allow yourself to be hypnotized. You have to cooperate. But it was real interesting to see them doing – he told us all the things they’d be doing when they woke up, and it was really funny to see these people doing these various things that were not apropos. Very effective. It was high activity back then because of age. There were so many single young women like me and so many single men like Chuck. Now, Chuck lived at the barracks, and they had ball games and they had a little band and they had different things.
Mr. Kolb: A band?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had a band.
Mr. Kolb: You mean like a dance band?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, it was a marching band. Yeah, they had a little marching band.
Mr. Kolb: Was he in the SED?
Mrs. Schmitt: SED. Oh yeah. He was sent here. He was a soldier and he was ready to go –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I knew Grady Whitman was in the SED also.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah, he was in SED, and he lived down in the barracks. Let me tell you an interesting story. I don’t know whether it’s interesting for this or not, but Chuck had – call it ‘extra sensory perception.’ I’ll tell you about the incident that we experienced with him. My parents, before we were married, invited me and Chuck, on a Saturday, to go to the Smoky Mountains. They had rented a cabin and invited me and Chuck. They were going to treat us.
Mr. Kolb: Before you got married or after?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was before we got married. So we worked a half day on Saturday then. We worked till noon on Saturday, so Chuck had appeared at my office up at the AEC. I don’t know how we were going to get up to the Smokies. It’s funny how these little details – we were going and we had a way, but I don’t remember how. Anyway, Chuck showed up about an hour before time to get off. When he came in the room, he was just ashen, he looked – and my boss, Glen Wiltrout immediately said, “What’s wrong, Chuck?” And he said, “Nothing,” sort of like, but you didn’t believe it. I had already said that to him. Glen wasn’t in the room when he first came in. I said, “What’s wrong Chuck?” He said, “Nothing.” And I said, “Where did you go last night after you left me?” It looked like he had a hangover or he looked very distressed and very pale, but he denied knowing anything was wrong, and then when Glen came in and asked him, you know, we both knew something was wrong. So we were sitting there, and about ten minutes of twelve, the phone rang. It was the barracks, and they – at the barracks, they knew that Chuck and I were dating. Enough people knew it that when they were trying to find Chuck – Chuck had had a telegram from New York City saying, “Come home at once. Your father is on dying with a stroke.” They called about ten minutes before we were to leave, and he said, “Chuck, we have a car and going to pick you up and take you immediately to the airport. We’ve made arrangements for you to go home.” So Chuck just said, “Oh, I knew I wasn’t going to Gatlinburg, but I didn’t know why.” He had this ominous feeling. He was relieved. He said, “I knew, but I didn’t know why.” He had a foreboding of bad news, but he didn’t know what it was. But the minute he heard it, he said, “I knew I wasn’t going to the mountains.”
Mr. Kolb: So he went home. Did his father pass away?
Mrs. Schmitt: His father did not pass away that time. He lived longer, but he was always affected by the stroke. The early days here in Oak Ridge were very great. The thing that struck me, I met a lot of people, mainly I would say eighty percent of the people here were from somewhere else and they would badmouth this place and talk bad about it, and boy they couldn’t wait to get home.
Mr. Kolb: Of course the mud and all the other –
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, the mud, and the nothing to do compared to a city where they’re from.
Mr. Kolb: Of course Oak Ridge did create a Playhouse and had a symphony early on and those different things.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, they didn’t have any cultural advance at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Oh they didn’t? You mean not right away.
Mrs. Schmitt: In the beginning, no, and these people couldn’t wait to either get out of the Army and go home or whatever. Later, I would run into one of them, like Jack and Peggy Thompson; they could not wait to leave this place and go to New York City. So that’s all I heard. They lived across the street from me and Chuck. One day I ran into Jack down here and I said, “What are you doing down here?” I’d heard he’d gone back. He said, “Well, after we got back, it wasn’t the same anymore.” He said, “We longed to be back here.” That happened to a whole lot of people. They thought they wanted to go back.
Mr. Kolb: But then after they got back it wasn’t the same.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was just too hectic and they sort of reflected on the peaceful life they had here and the ease of life. You could get to where you’re going in ten minutes. So that’s how come now in Tennessee we’ve got all these Yankees here.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, not just Yankees, but people from all over.
Mrs. Schmitt: They’re here from all over. I am actually a minority in my Bridge Club here. I’m a minority; there are about three or four people native Tennesseans.
Mr. Kolb: Did any of your classmates in your high school class go to work in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. Naomi Manning married Fred Wilt. He was about twenty years older than her. They’re both dead now, but she started working up at the Castle and she met Fred Wilt and married him. But not many of them did. I was surprised.
Mr. Kolb: The money was good, the best job you could get.
Mrs. Schmitt: I know a whole lot of the fellows got jobs at the plants, like Jig Seivers, and David Jennings, he had a big part down here. He was always a smart guy in school.
Mr. Kolb: He was in your high school?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. In my high school, your old standout, and he went on to college and had a nice job down here.
Mr. Kolb: Well how about things like rationing and waiting in line for various items?
Mrs. Schmitt: Okay, anytime, the rule was this: if you were out and about and saw a line, you just went over and stood in it and you didn’t care what they had, because whatever they were selling, if you didn’t want it, somebody you knew did.
Mr. Kolb: So you bought it and then you’d trade it.
Mrs. Schmitt: You just stood in line, and sometimes you were lucky and they had Fatima cigarettes. We couldn’t hardly find cigarettes, which was good back then but now it’s bad. Now, who cares?
Mr. Kolb: Did you smoke?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh absolutely, like a smoke stack. I smoked till my husband died and I quit. Very, very bad habit, but everybody I knew smoked then. You were odd if you didn’t smoke, so the pressure was on people to smoke.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you couldn’t get any stockings and that kind of thing, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Didn’t get any?
Mr. Kolb: Stockings. Silk stockings.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, I was lucky because my dad worked in the hosiery mill and I had all the stockings I needed. Over the counter, you couldn’t get it, things like sugar, meat, just little things like that. If we stood in line at the grocery store and got a ham hock, we were thrilled. We ate a lot of canned Spam, which I don’t care to eat now, and I’ll tell you about a funny night. Liquor was not sold or available anyway here, nor allowed, so one night Chuck and I were sitting out in front of Bayonne Hall after having gone to a dance at the Grove one Saturday night, and here came a man walking down the walkway with a tray and an ice bucket and several bottles of Gin, Vermouth, Jack Daniels.
Mr. Kolb: Out in the open?
Mrs. Schmitt: Out in the open, and it was midnight, and he walked down, walked right up to where we were sitting on the bench, sat the tray down and said, “What would you like?” So I told him, “I want a margarita.” And I forgot what Chuck got. Anyway, as people were returning from the dance, it started with me and Chuck, it ended up we had about twenty people there. As they came home, he’d say, “Hey, would you like a drink?” He said, “I’m spreading good will.” So he depleted his supply, and then he said, “Everybody come up to my apartment.” And that was where the Blue Hound Grill is right now, I think the building right beside it [that] they’re renting now, is where he lived. Twenty or thirty people followed him right up there to the apartment. The worst thing about this, we didn’t leave there till about four in the morning and we were all drunk, so Chuck is walking me back to the dorm, both of us drunk, when Brooks Bowen and Helen, his girlfriend, came out the door and said, “Hey, want to go fishing on Norris Lake?” We said, “Absolutely!”
Mr. Kolb: Right then?
Mrs. Schmitt: Right then. We got in the car. So in the middle of the fishing trip, about eleven o’clock out on Norris Lake, I said, “Oh no, I was supposed to work today for Colonel Vandenbock.”
Mr. Kolb: You forgot?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was a work day. I didn’t have a thought about it and I’m up there on the middle of the lake and I was supposed to be at work at eight that Saturday morning to work for him.
Mr. Kolb: And you missed it? Yeah, I guess so.
Mrs. Schmitt: I never heard a word about that. I never heard anything about it. I guess they just thought I forgot it or something.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you did.
Mrs. Schmitt: I did.
Mr. Kolb: This man, he’s an entrepreneur?
Mrs. Schmitt: He was just this man.
Mr. Kolb: Just making money?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, he didn’t charge; it was all free. He was spreading good will. He said, “I’m here to spread some good will.”
Mr. Kolb: So he paid for the liquor and just –
Mrs. Schmitt: He had all this liquor. I don’t know how he got it in.
Mr. Kolb: Did this happen just once or did it happen more than once?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh just one time, just a one-time occasion.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I’m sure that word would spread pretty fast.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, it was a memorable occasion. What little I can remember of it. Jim, I was young and stupid back then. I would forget my badge all the time, all the time, and to go in the gate we always pinned our badge underneath our coat, so we’d flash our coat open.
Mr. Kolb: This is just to get into work, you mean?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, when I was still living in Clinton, and getting down here, coming in and out, or if I went out to Big Ridge with a group, I was always forgetting my badge. It was okay if I knew it, because I’d say, “Oh, I don’t have my badge. I’ll have to distract the guard.”
Mr. Kolb: You’d get through without –
Mrs. Schmitt: All the time. I don’t know how many times, I’d flash my coat and then say, “Hey, did you all hear about that dog down there that ….” You know, I’d –
Mr. Kolb: Distract them.
Mrs. Schmitt: I’d distract them. So then one day, I was at work, I had gotten in without my badge, just easy like I always did by distracting. I was leaving with my boss, Glen Wiltrout. We were going out at the same time, and I was busy talking to Glen, and you know I never have trouble talking. So I held my coat open while I’m talking to Glen and I walk on by, only I forgot I didn’t have a badge, and when I walk on by, this guard computes it and he said, “Hey, you, you didn’t have a badge under there!” So I start running. I ran to the car. Well the next day, Glen –
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t follow you?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, they didn’t, but Glen – ’cause by then they sort of knew you – but Glen said, “Toni, you are going to get killed coming in and out. You must start wearing your badge.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try to think of it.” But that was just funny. I forgot to buzz him off, you know.
Mr. Kolb: So the guards could be distracted. Of course, there are so many people coming.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and especially if you distract them.
Mr. Kolb: Boy, you lived a little dangerously. You mentioned that you and Chuck got married at the Chapel on the Hill, which is an interdenominational church at that time.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, well we only had chapels at that time, no denomination.
Mr. Kolb: Now Chuck’s religion is Lutheran, I guess. What was yours? Baptist background?
Mrs. Schmitt: I was born a Baptist, raised a Baptist. No mention was ever said of Lutheran or Baptist. Stuart Rule was a Baptist minister who did marry us, and I knew he was a Baptist minister in the area. Maybe he gave talks at that chapel. Anyway, he married me, and Chuck had no thing to say in it, or he didn’t mention anything about it. But the reason I became Lutheran, Chuck was so fervent in his religion that he wouldn’t miss a church service, and this impressed me ’cause as a young feisty girl, we would be up all night dancing, and sometimes I didn’t care to go to church in the morning. So I just, after I married Chuck – another thing, very few Lutherans ever change their religion. But I’m of the opinion that I think a family should go to the same church, so I joined Chuck’s church and I love that church.
Mr. Kolb: Where was that? In East Village did you worship?
Mrs. Schmitt: We worshipped in East Village and when, actually, Pastor Walter Grum came and dug for the church where it is now. They laid the ground, cut the ground, and put the cornerstone in.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Toni, now we talked about you getting married and then you and Chuck joined the Lutheran church you said after that. I guess your life changed dramatically after you got married. I mean, I’m sure you still went to dance, but did you have your family right away or how did that go?
Mrs. Schmitt: I worked, we were married in ’45 and –
Mr. Kolb: Before the end of the war?
Mrs. Schmitt: That was right after, and I continued working until I became pregnant with my first child, which – my first child was born in ’47; I married in ’45. When I learned that I was going to have a baby, I quit work because –
Mr. Kolb: And you were still working for the same man?
Mrs. Schmitt: I was working for – Mr. Diamond had gone. I was working for Mr. Sullivan at AEC. At that time, when I think back about that, that’s like the dark ages, because we transmit material, information today by fax, by e-mail –
Mr. Kolb: Electronically.
Mrs. Schmitt: Electronically, and then I was married and I did not know I was pregnant, but my boss called me in, said, “These important papers have to be in Washington, D.C. tomorrow. I’m going to put you on a train tonight.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, send you as a courier?
Mrs. Schmitt: They sent me as a courier. So when I got up there and delivered my message, Glen Wiltrout, my first boss, had already gone back to Washington. The war was over. So I went to see Glen and visit him.
Mr. Kolb: Was this in the Atomic Energy Commission Office up there?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, I went to his home. They had me out to his home, he and Frankie. I knew his family well because he had his family down here when he was my boss and his wife was a nurse. So anyway, they prepared this nice dinner for me that night, and when I sat down to eat, I said, “Frankie, I can’t eat this.” I was puzzled because I was a big eater, and she looked at me and she said, “Toni, come with me.” So I went with her and –
Mr. Kolb: Did you not have any appetite or what?
Mrs. Schmitt: I just said, “I can’t eat this.” I said, “I don’t know why.” I couldn’t eat it and that was all I told her, I couldn’t eat it. I think it was something fried. Anyway, I didn’t know why I couldn’t eat it. She knew why. She took me upstairs and she said, “Toni, do you know that you’re pregnant?” I said, “I am?” And I was thrilled, I was thrilled to death.
Mr. Kolb: And she was right?
Mrs. Schmitt: She was right. I came right home and went to a doctor. I was so young and stupid I didn��t know you went to a gynecologist to deliver your baby.
Mr. Kolb: You always had them at home?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, I knew you went to the hospital, but I went to see a doctor and he was a doctor from Texas and he was a big – Duvall was his name – he was a tall, good looking doctor, and when I went to see him he said, “No, you’re not pregnant.” Well I burst into tears and I cried so hard I couldn’t stop crying and he said, “What is wrong with you? Every time I tell a young person that they want to hug my neck and kiss me when I tell them they’re not pregnant.” And that made me cry even harder, and finally he didn’t know what to do with me, ’cause men feel so helpless when a woman is broken hearted. I was broken hearted. And he said, “Well, do you want to kill the rabbit?” I didn’t know what that meant, but back in those ancient days, the only way they could really tell for sure you were pregnant was to inject the rabbit, and then they somehow could tell. So I said, “Yes, I want to kill the rabbit.” So three days later I came back and he said, “You’re pregnant.” So I burst into tears all over again and cried buckets because I was so happy and he just –
Mr. Kolb: So he had been wrong the first time?
Mrs. Schmitt: He had been wrong, and Frankie my friend in Washington, Glen Wiltrout’s wife, Frankie Wiltrout had been right. But anyway, the upshot of the thing was that he told me later – or Dr. Reagan, who delivers babies – what do they call that? Not pediatrician. Obstetrician is that what they call them.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: Obstetrician. Well, see, I had trouble because when Jeff came, he was breech birth, and Dr. Duvall called in Dr. Reagan, and Dr. Reagan told me that my baby wouldn’t have lived if he hadn’t called him in. But this man said, “I would never want to tell that women she lost her baby,” because I had cried and cried.
Mr. Kolb: Did they do a Cesarean?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, they didn’t, but he just knew how to do it I guess. ’Cause back then when we went to the doctor, you went – in the early days – this is before then, before this period – you would go – you didn’t have a doctor. You had any Army doctor that they assigned you to, and I had a very bad experience with that. I don’t even know whether I should repeat it. You can knock out anything you don’t want. I went to get my license to be married or to get my blood test, and when the doctor got the results, he said to me, “Well, who did you have intercourse with?” And I said, “Nobody.” And he treated me real hatefully. He insisted I had, and he was making fun of me. He said, “You don’t catch this from a toilet seat.” And I just kept telling him that. I said, “Well I don’t care. That’s wrong.” So I kept persisting. I said, “Your test is wrong. Now, you just take another one,” ’cause I knew –
Mr. Kolb: What did he claim you had?
Mrs. Schmitt: He claimed I had a venereal disease, and he claimed, you don’t get this off a toilet seat and your test shows something. And I said, “Well the test is wrong.” But anyway, it really hurt me deeply. He didn’t believe it was wrong, but he did another test and it was wrong.
Mr. Kolb: The second test was right.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. But I was – back then, my name was very valuable. I was brought up under the old rule that once your name is – you didn’t mess around.
Mr. Kolb: Not like that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Not like today. But anyway, that stayed with me a long, long time, that feeling of degrading or whatever.
Mr. Kolb: Those army doctors, they had an interesting –
Mrs. Schmitt: He was tough. He really thought that I was loose person.
Mr. Kolb: How did these security aspects, the secretness – you told me about how your husband had guessed – but going back when you first were employed, working in this very tense atmosphere, I mean, you couldn’t talk about what you did, and you’re a talkative person. How did this affect you?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had, did you know this, that they had WACs sitting in an office, Women Army Corp, sitting in an office doing nothing but reading every newspaper in the world, every day.
Mr. Kolb: Here in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, the crew was here in Oak Ridge, all they did was read newspapers. Any mention of nuclear, any mention of anything even connected with any of the ingredients to make a bomb, they would visit these people and warn them like, “Don’t mention anything like this.”
Mr. Kolb: How did you find this out?
Mrs. Schmitt: My boss told me that. I was in legal, and he said they had this crew and all they did was read newspapers, and one lady in Oak Ridge was going to name her child Urania and she wasn’t allowed to. They made a visit on her.
Mr. Kolb: Did she know something about uranium?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know whether she knew or not but they didn’t want it. Every textbook was taken out of every library all over the country on any subject like that. Did you know that? The government went into every library all over the country. Any reference to any of the ingredients of a bomb, they took the books out.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Schmitt: They did.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: But Toni, did you know, I’ve been told that – I think it’s true – that the Army had Army Intelligence personnel people positioned in every group as spies?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes I did, and I have a story to tell you about it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, were you aware of that?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, not till later. Okay, my husband worked in a group headed by Seymour Smiley, he was head of the department.
Mr. Kolb: Which plant was this?
Mrs. Schmitt: This was at K-25, and so had an employee named Don Brader. Don had the florist out at Bruner’s for a long time, Brader Greenhouse. Don Brader was an agent, CIA agent, but he was all dressed up like a GI. He got a check from them every week, which he tore up, from the plant. He was a plainclothesman – I forgot – I messed up the story. He was an employee and he was in plainclothes, and he got a check every week which he tore up because he was really a soldier, but he was on the CIA. He and Sy Smiley were best friends. They did everything together. One day after the war, Don went to Sy and said, “Sy, I need to be off next week. I’m going to be discharged from the Army.” And Sy says, “What do you mean from the Army? You’re not in the Army. You get a check every week here.” He said, “I’ve been in the Army and I’m a spy.” And Sy was so mad at him, he was furious. He said, “You mean you’ve been spying on me this whole time?” And Don said, “Yep.”
Mr. Kolb: You and a lot of other people
Mrs. Schmitt: And he said, “What about the checks you get every week?” Don said, “I had to tear them up. I ripped them up when I got them.”
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he got another check from the Army.
Mrs. Schmitt: He was in the Army. I knew that firsthand.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause I’d had people, you know –
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, they found out later.
Mr. Kolb: They had some funny expression for these spies, the Army whatever. Of course, you didn’t know who was who.
Mrs. Schmitt: No, you didn’t know it. They didn’t know until Don Brader was going to be discharged, and Sy was just floored. In fact, he was mad ’cause he thought, he’s such a good friend, he should have been told. But no, he was never told. A thing about Oak Ridge we haven’t mentioned was the safety you felt since everybody –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause it was in the closed, guarded –
Mrs. Schmitt: No door was ever locked, cars were never locked, nothing was ever locked, and it was a great feeling, which – that changed.
Mr. Kolb: But was there no thieves in this town? I mean, certainly they could take advantage of other people.
Mrs. Schmitt: I guess not. Well, everybody had a badge and they were known. I don’t know why. No, we didn’t hear of anything like that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, of course probably you would have traveled fast if there had been somebody, and there probably were a few.
Mrs. Schmitt: There might have been, but we never heard of any. Colonel Vandenbock was head of our department. He was over my boss, Ed Diamond, ’cause he was the big director of the whole legal and some other sections. I was invited to a dance at UT one night with another girl and we were invited, as ROTC fellows at UT invited us, and I didn’t have an evening gown. I heard that Colonel Vandenbock’s secretary had an evening gown. She was tall and slender, about my size, so I went down. Sherry was her name. I forget her last name. So I said, “Sherry, I need to borrow an evening gown.” “Sure, I’ve never even worn it, Toni, but you’re welcome to it.” So she gave it to me. My friend already lived in Knoxville and I was to meet her at UT that night. So I had my box, the evening gown in a box, and I took a bus to Solway gate, ’cause I was going to UT. A car came by and said, “Going to Knoxville? Come on get in.” So the first car that came, and it’s a man driving all alone. I said, “Going to Knoxville?” And he [said], “Get in.��� So I put my evening gown on the back seat. Well, I was busy talking to him. Like I said before, I never have any trouble talking, and I was talking to him about everything. I found everything about him except where he lived. Knew where he worked and I knew his first name, but I didn’t – the bottom line, I got out of that car, waved goodbye and he went off with my dress, Sherry’s dress, brand new dress that I had borrowed. And back then, money was very scarce and you just didn’t have money to buy an evening gown. In fact, Sherry was well thought of, ’cause word was out that she had one.
Mr. Kolb: Did you recover it?
Mrs. Schmitt: Absolutely. But how? I got up at four o’clock the next morning and took a bus to Solway Gate and every car that came in, I waited for him to come in. I said, “There he is” to the guard.
Mr. Kolb: Did he have the dress?
Mrs. Schmitt: When he saw me, he said, “Shewww, boy, did you almost get me in trouble last night.” He said, “My wife wanted to go to the movie,” and he said, “If I hadn’t gone out first and found your dress ….” He was getting it out of the trunk when he was telling me this. He said, “I went out first. If I hadn’t done that and had time to hide it in my trunk, I could never explain that dress to my wife.”
Mr. Kolb: I bet.
Mrs. Schmitt: So he opened the trunk and handed it to me.
Mr. Kolb: So you went to the dance without the dress?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, without the dress. So I came back the next morning and put in on Sherry’s desk and I said, “It’s in top condition, never been out of the box, Sherry.” That’s just one of the stupid things I did.
Mr. Kolb: That is crazy. That was a close shave.
Mrs. Schmitt: Very close shave. I was so happy I got it back.
Mr. Kolb: So this was a complete stranger.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, it was a complete stranger, and you never once thought he could be a killer or –
Mr. Kolb: Right, right.
Mrs. Schmitt: Nobody would ever hear from me again. We never even thought in terms like that. Now, you wouldn’t do that.
Mr. Kolb: Of course not.
Mrs. Schmitt: But then it was okay.
Mr. Kolb: Well these situations that you fall into make a lasting impression, that’s for sure.
Mrs. Schmitt: I was trying to think of anything else of interest I could tell you.
Mr. Kolb: Well let me ask you about when in ’49 and the gates were finally opened, leading up to that, as I recall, there was a vote, a referendum on whether the city should be opened up, and do you remember that?
Mrs. Schmitt: I have no recollection of that. I probably – that was when my second baby was being born. Jeff was born in ’47, Kathy was in ’49, and I wasn’t aware of it.
Mr. Kolb: Well they had a referendum, and as I understand it, the first vote was turned down. The people didn’t want it to change; they wanted –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, it had to soak in for a while I think. We felt secure here.
Mr. Kolb: Well sure, but you remember when the event of the gates opening, the big parade?
Mrs. Schmitt: I remember the big parade and I was in line right on the turnpike to see it. I was somewhere near where Illinois Avenue, not Illinois but Lafayette Drive and where the Baptist Church is, I was standing right there when the motor parade went by.
Mr. Kolb: Saw the movie stars and all that kind of thing.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, that was a great day.
Mr. Kolb: Big hoopla. Yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: The biggest thing about Oak Ridge I thought was the people stayed here. The people had come here from everywhere, stayed, and the ones that went back came back. I don’t know how many people I knew like Peggy and Jack Thompson that they couldn’t wait to leave. They came back.
Mr. Kolb: Went back to New York City –
Mrs. Schmitt: And they didn’t like it anymore. They had something to compare it to. And Knoxville finally accepted us for a long time.
Mr. Kolb: Well now, you being a native Tennessean, you should have had no problem going to Knoxville like some of the other Yankees.
Mrs. Schmitt: I didn’t have any problem over at Knoxville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, how about Chuck?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, Chuck would not communicate with people when we’d go in. He’d say, “Toni you talk,” because see, Yankees at that time did not know how to converse with the Tennessee people. With Tennessee people, you don’t just go in and state your business. If you go in a store, you have to have some little leading up to it, like –
Mr. Kolb: How you doing?
Mrs. Schmitt: “Nice day we’re having today” and some little extra thing, and Chuck didn’t know the code on that, so he would say, “Toni, you go in and talk.”
Mr. Kolb: More effective for you. But he was accepted by your whole relationship, huge relationship. I bet it was a bit of a challenge for him to keep up with just who your family members were.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was.
Mr. Kolb: A challenge for you at times.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, because he was an only child.
Mr. Kolb: He was an only child?
Mrs. Schmitt: He was an only child. At his home, his plate was served in the kitchen and placed in front of him. When I was there, everybody had to have bowls on the table, his plate was served, and never in his life �� every day his clothes were laid out for him.
Mr. Kolb: His mother just took care of it.
Mrs. Schmitt: At night when he studied, he had a big container of peanut butter, huge container, and a huge container of pickled herring that he could eat while he was studying. And if he asked for anything, if they were on an outing, if he asked for an ice cream cone, Pop would say “Have four, I’ll get you four.” Chuck was always embarrassed by this. First of all, he was embarrassed by his lunch at school because the meat would be much thicker than the bread, and everybody was saying “Where you getting those sandwich Charlie?” And he was ashamed of it. Then when they’d go out, even when I went to visit, if we were out to the zoo or something, went to an ice cream shop, and if you ordered anything, “Bring her two banana splits, and bring one for yourself,” he’d tell the waiter. So you learned with this kind of parent, when they ask you if you want an ice cream cone, you say, “No thank you,” ’cause you’re so embarrassed. And I learned that very quickly up there ’cause when I went to visit in New York, there were several things that I found different. We had never heard of anything but French’s Mustard and they had Gulden’s, and when I tasted it, I thought it was wonderful. So I commented, I said, “This is a wonderful mustard,” and so I got a case of it. Everything I said –
Mr. Kolb: They’d overwhelm you with whatever.
Mrs. Schmitt: That is exactly right. See, and they’re the ones that wanted Chuck to live there forever and “We’ll take care of you.” Another thing I admired, they had Lady Godiva Chocolates. Well down here, we’d never heard of those, and I commented how good they were. Well, I got about ten boxes. So you learned quickly. He was really spoiled rotten. He didn’t live in the real world.
Mr. Kolb: Was that hard for you? I mean he had to adjust –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, first of all, it was so different from my background, where we were taught entirely different and very much loved. While you might call that love, it wasn’t because –
Mr. Kolb: It’s creating a dependency wasn’t it?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well no, on the other hand, he had no freedoms. Once, when he came home from a Boy Scout meeting, he was late, and when they asked him why he didn’t get home on time, he said all the Boy Scouts went with the Girl Scouts to the ice cream parlor, and he received a beating for that because they didn’t want him associating with girls. Once, he was put in the cellar in the coal bin, in the cellar where there were rats, for some minor thing. See, they were real hard on him at one place but real lenient on the other. So anyway, the neighbor called the policeman and they came to the house and they told Pop, said, “You get him out of that coal bin.” And everyone was afraid his father was a tyrant. Everyone was afraid of him. So Chuck was afraid of him too.
Mr. Kolb: He was probably glad to get down here to Tennessee.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, once, we were on the street and we met his doctor, and Chuck introduced me to him, and we talked a few minutes, and he said to Chuck, “Chuck the luckiest thing you’ve ever done in your life was to go to Tennessee and marry this little lady.”
Mr. Kolb: I bet.
Mrs. Schmitt: Right away he said that. But see, the first time I entered Chuck’s house, all the light bulbs, overhead light bulbs, which – they didn’t have fixtures – were painted red. You could hardly see in their house. All the activity was around the dining room table, and luckily it had a bay window with three windows so it wasn’t too dark, but at night, the red light bulb. They claimed it hurt their eyes, the light. The first night I was there – I am nineteen years old when I am there – I never tasted a drink of liquor. Baptists don’t drink, and they’re brought up not to drink; they don’t drink wine even. So there was a knock on my door after I went to bed, and Mom Schmitt said, “Take this bottle for a night cap.” I said, “Oh no, Mrs. Schmitt, I don’t drink.” She said, “Never mind, take this, take it, take it and have a little drink.” And I said, “No thank you, I don’t drink.” I thought it was awful to drink. And so she said, “Well, just set it on your dresser.” So I did. So two or three days, each day Chuck was getting more aloof with me, more aloof and more aloof. One day we were riding the subway into Manhattan and he was so withdrawn, and I said, “What’s wrong, Chuck?” And he said, “Nothing.” So we went on in. We went on the top of the Empire State Building and we’re looking down at all these little yellow taxis, when I say, “Chuck something is wrong and I want to know what it is, and tell me.” So he said, ���Well, I don’t think it’s very nice what you’ve been doing.” I said, “Now, what have I been doing?” He said, “Well, first of all, you asked my mother for a bottle.” And I didn’t deny; I just listened. And he said, “Second, you left a personal object in the bathroom for her to have to get rid of. That was to insult her. And third, when Uncle Freddy came to visit, you appeared in your pajamas.” I had pajamas and a lounging robe on. So apparently only a woman of ill repute would do these things. So I didn’t deny any of them, but I just looked at Chuck and I know fire was flashing out of my eyes, and I said, “Do you believe your mother?” And I was just waiting, and he looked at me and he said, “No.”
Mr. Kolb: He was smart enough to know what to say.
Mrs. Schmitt: I never did deny any of the accusations. I just will never forget the moment that I looked down at the taxi cabs and I thought for a long minute, and then I said, “Chuck,” – he had given me a ring at that time, while I was there – I said, “Chuck, I do not think I want to marry you unless you promise I will never have to live within 300 hundred miles of your parents.” And he repeated that. He said, “Toni, you will never have to live within 300 miles of my parents.”
Mr. Kolb: So they were more than a day’s drive away.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and every morning, she’d take him down in the basement: “Fine woman you send here, fine woman. You know what she did? She left this stuff in the bathroom opened for me to have to put away.” And then the next day she said, “Coming out in pajamas in front of Uncle Freddy. A good woman doesn’t do that.” And you know it was a perfectly nice robe over pajamas.
Mr. Kolb: They would have been happier if –
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh they hated me; they hated me on sight.
Mr. Kolb: Well you made the best of it, I guess.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, due to my upbringing, where my mother said, “When you marry a man, you marry his family. Don’t think you don’t.” She said, “If these people have raised your husband, they’re the parents and you have to like them.” So I ignored it. I totally ignored what they did. I wrote them one letter every week.
Mr. Kolb: You did?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did Chuck ever write them?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know. I don’t think he ever wrote them much, but I wrote a letter a week and sent – and by the time they died – Pop died first, Mom died – if she wanted anything, it was Toni. She called Toni. “Would you get me some water? Would you do this?”
Mr. Kolb: You brought her around.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, it took a long time. One time when the children were about teenagers she said to me, “Toni, we did not know what to do when we had Chuck. We did not raise him right, but you are raising your children so well.” She realized it after all that.
Mr. Kolb: Well that’s a – I knew there was a big cultural divide. Well, Toni, only one more thing here. You did say earlier that you’d heard indirectly about the project being about the Atomic Bomb, but when you did – well, and Chuck heard about it at work – you said the day – well, he knew about it before. Did he guess it or did he [know it]?
Mrs. Schmitt: He guessed it, what they were doing. He guessed it.
Mr. Kolb: But he didn’t discuss it with anyone.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh no, never said a word, didn’t even say any word the day of –
Mr. Kolb: Well, when it actually happened and the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, what was the atmosphere? What did you do that day?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, everyone was jubilant and they celebrated.
Mr. Kolb: Did you leave work early?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, work was just chaos. I mean, we were there, but everybody was just whooping and hollering and talking and –
Mr. Kolb: It was like a party atmosphere.
Mrs. Schmitt: That was just a big party day.
Mr. Kolb: That night, was there a party in town?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t remember what I did that night, but I’m sure of it. I don’t have a good memory for stuff like that particular night. I remember the day of the parade, when I was watching the parade go by, but we were always going out to the dances, so I’m sure we were at a dance that night. Everyone was jubilant over the news. We were happy they ended the war, and we had to find out later that it wasn’t very kosher to say that you’d built the atomic bomb. We learned later when we went different places and different states to downplay that because it wasn’t looked on favorably by everybody else.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah. You had to be careful. It was brought to our attention several times, like when we were in Arizona some place, we’d get negative vibes on that.
Mr. Kolb: Was this right away or years later?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was two or three years later, after the furor over the news died down. We learned to sort of – we’d say we’re from Oak Ridge, but we wouldn’t add Home of the Atomic Bomb. Well, they found out here, you know, they changed it. They had to get away from that aspect, ’cause now we do mostly research. But it wasn’t very popular. In fact, in schools today, when my children were in school, they had to report on – my grandchildren had to do reports on what we thought about the atomic bomb, and I had to write for Emily, when she was in school, my thoughts, which she gave at school from my aspect, and they studied that, and I guess people are still debating whether that was good or bad.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s been a lot of revisionist historians, you might say. You look back and you say in perfect, perfect, 20/20 hindsight, Truman should have done this and any other thing, but they don’t realize that the stress that was going on – and he didn’t know everything that was going on. Sure the Japanese were trying to – the Emperor was trying to find a way to get out of the war, and the military people were not, of course, but you know he didn’t know how fast they were going to move. You didn’t know all these things, so you can’t or you shouldn’t fault. But people like to do that; they like to second guess and create controversy. The Enola Gay was not accepted in the Smithsonian for a while because it was controversial.
Mrs. Schmitt: I know; that’s what I’m saying. We found out that you don’t always brag about, “We built the atomic bomb here.” You think any of this is worthwhile?
Mr. Kolb: Of course, this is fantastic, Toni. This is what we want and need. Yes, it is worthwhile. This is what historians will look back on when we’re all dead and gone; they’ll look back at these personal remembrances. So just before we wrap up then, any other unique experiences you want to maybe throw out about the WWII period at the time or that era of Oak Ridge? I guess you would agree that Oak Ridge was a unique community, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh –
Mr. Kolb: How’s it unique?
Mrs. Schmitt: Not only the ��� Oak Ridge saved this part of the country. Back then, there was no work anywhere, hardly.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, the economic impact –
Mrs. Schmitt: And it gave us a boost to put us where we are today, really, and before, when I was growing up, everything was just sleepy little city around here.
Mr. Kolb: If you hadn’t gotten a job here, what were you thinking about becoming or trying to do?
Mrs. Schmitt: I probably would have been a secretary somewhere, probably had to go to Knoxville or something like that. I was real happy that I could come down here. I think Oak Ridge did so much for this area.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe it wasn’t appreciated at the time by the locals in Clinton and Knoxville.
Mrs. Schmitt: Probably not. I bet they all appreciate it now.
Mr. Kolb: We are all so different.
Mrs. Schmitt: That’s true.
Mr. Kolb: And you made a lot of friends from all over.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah, all over. I worked for ORTEC for a long time, you know, and I worked in personnel, and I was responsible for introducing all these different people to things to do in Oak Ridge. We would recruit physicists from Hungary, Italy, Germany, Japan, and I would – when they would come here to work – well, I was in charge of getting their visas, and then when they came, I would take them around and “show them the ropes” so to speak. And a lot of those people are still here today. Mario Martini and Judy – I don’t know if you know them – they are from Italy.
Mr. Kolb: Judy Martini, I know of them.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well that’s one family. The Elads – that was a Jewish family. An interesting fact: this man came from Hungary to work, and he was a well known scientist, but he could only come out. He had permission to come out and work at ORTEC, but his wife and children couldn’t come. He could bring with him a child or a wife, but if he brought the wife, he couldn’t bring the children; brought the children, he couldn’t bring the wife.
Mr. Kolb: That doesn’t make any sense. Is it because of lack of housing?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh no. It was because [of] the communist country.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: Hungary was a communist [country]. So anyway, Alexander Deize came. I took Alex all around, showed him all the ropes, and he lived here for a long time, and then he went back to Hungary. Now, four years has passed and my daughter graduates from UT, and she went to Connecticut to a music camp and she called one day and said, “Mom, I’ve been offered a Ford Foundation Scholarship and it consists of a year study in Boston learning Hungarian and then a year in Hungary where the composer Kodaly lived. It’s a method of teaching music, voice to children, similar to how they teach violin, hands on. And she said the only thing I have to do is guarantee that when I finish the two year course, I will teach in a school system that uses this method. So when she said Hungary, I knew that that was very interesting, and I said, “Kathy I know someone in Hungary, Alexander Deize.” So Kathy did the year in Boston and she learned to speak Hungarian. Then she went to Hungary and Alex helped her get housing, and he helped her like I had helped him.
Mr. Kolb: Payback.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was a payback day. And it was so nice that, and in the meantime, we’d made plans to go visit Kathy, and Chuck was at Y-12 in weapons development. Now this is a facet where it got into trouble. We had no thought of anything being illegal or anything, so I wrote Washington for visas. Chuck and I were going to go over. So in about three weeks at work, a man came to Chuck and said, “Come to the board room at five o’clock after work or 4:30 when you get off.” And Chuck thought, oh, they’re going to give me a raise. So Chuck goes in, and all these people are sitting around this big table and they’re all solemn looking and they say, “We understand you have a visa to go into Hungary.” And Chuck said, “Yes.” And they proceeded to tell him that, “We cannot tell you not to go,” but they indicated if he did that he wouldn’t have a job when he got back. And then they said, “Now, this is what��s going to happen to you if you go in there. If you go in there, somebody’s going to arrange to meet you, and they’re going to drug you, and they’re going to get –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, get information.
Mrs. Schmitt: Pick your brain.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t go?
Mrs. Schmitt: Chuck didn’t go. So Chuck came home and told me this. He said, “Toni, I can’t go in, but they said don’t write and tell Kathy that I can’t come in ’cause they might hold you if they know that I was that important or had that much information.” So anyway, I said, “Well I’ve got to tell Kathy in some way before I go over there because she’ll be so disappointed.” So I write this letter and I say, “Now, Kathy, here are our plans. Listen carefully. We are going to be leaving Connecticut so-and-so. We are arriving in so-and-so. Will you do this, will you do that?” And then I switch down in there, I say, “I will be arriving in Hungary at Budapest at such-and-such and such-and-such,” and then in the next paragraph said, “We will be going from there to such.” So she goes up to Alexander Deize’s house that night with the letter and said, “Alex, listen to this letter from my mother. That sounds so self-centered when my mother says I, I.” And she said, “And my mother’s not like that.” He said, “Kathy, your father isn’t coming.” He got it right.
Mr. Kolb: He figured it out.
Mrs. Schmitt: He figured it out. I thought that was really interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So the message got through.
Mrs. Schmitt: The message got to her, but Alex had to tell her. So when I met Kathy, somebody had met Kathy and her friend, her roommate, about two weeks before we were to arrive and expressed a big interest, and found out that her parents were going to come visit and made plans to meet them. They wanted to meet them and everything, and Kathy knew right away that it was the underdog. But Chuck waited in Germany on me when I went into Budapest.
Mr. Kolb: Well things were really serious back then, the Cold War.
Mrs. Schmitt: And I was told – now, Jim, you know that I talk a lot, I made reference to that. Okay, I was told not to talk to anybody on the train. I went from Munich by train into Budapest and my instructions were: “Don’t talk to anybody and don’t take anything to drink from anybody.” Well, when I left Chuck, I’m terrified. I’m a Tennessee hillbilly. I don’t know any foreign language; I know nothing. I had a little book, Hungarian to English, English to Hungarian, and I get in this train car and there are three people in front of me in a seat and two beside, three facing each other, and they are all talking in Hungarian, just all of them talking. And I am leaning out the window telling Chuck goodbye and crying, just crying. So when I pull out, I slump back in my seat, tears are just – I’m scared to death is what I am, told not to talk to anybody, not to take a drink. This man, they’re all looking at me like – they���re saying in Hungarian, “What is wrong?” and I can’t tell them, so I finally get out my little book, “Child studying in Hungary, visit.” And they all go, “Ohh!” All of them are talking about three pages full in answer to that. Then a man brings out a bottle and hands it to me and I take a big swig and then I say, “Oh, I’m not supposed to do that.”
Mr. Kolb: Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
Mrs. Schmitt: They just thought somebody might drug me out here. But anyway, I broke all the rules before I even got out of the train station. Anyway, then we got to the border, Hungarian border, and we were there for hours, and it was a traumatic thing ’cause they came in our car and they opened every suitcase of everybody except mine. They did not bother mine. They had them open and they were bringing everything out to see what the Hungarians were bringing in. They didn’t bother mine, but I was scared to death, and they were out on the wheels of the cars banging each one to see if they sounded like they had anything hidden in them, and it was real scary.
Mr. Kolb: Oppressive sounding.
Mrs. Schmitt: When I pulled into the station at Budapest, I was crying still, I was crying.
Mr. Kolb: And Kathy met you.
Mrs. Schmitt: Kathy met me, and I was crying, crying.
Mr. Kolb: What were you crying for?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know why I was crying.
Mr. Kolb: Just happy to be there.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, then I was happy, relieved and happy.
Mr. Kolb: And then she did make good use of the educational training.
Mrs. Schmitt: I’ll tell you one last thing about Kathy. She’s an excellent music teacher and the repertoire that she picks for the competition is so much substance and greater that anyone else’s. She just returned from the whole state trials or competitions in Frederick, Maryland. She won all superiors by every one of the judges. All mention her repertoire. Her kids were singing in Hungarian.
Mr. Kolb: That’s amazing.
Mrs. Schmitt: She just blew them off the map, and she’s a very tough teacher. Every year, she’ll have different themes, like all this year is “We Can, Too!” And when they came back from the conference, they said, “We Did It!” Kathy said, “Mom, my best job is I’m a motivator.” She said, “I can motivate.” She’s only been at this school two years, and when she went – Cabin John is up between Washington and Maryland, Montgomery County – she was told that no one could replace the last music teacher. Everyone just said “No.” Well, she said, “Mom, I so far replaced him, can’t even remember his name.” I better get off bragging on Kathy, but Kathy is an instrument of God to do what she did. She started playing the piano by ear when she was five. I mean, she was put on the earth for music teacher, handpicked. I do believe that.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you and Chuck have musical backgrounds, but not to the point that –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, from my background, my mother played by ear, my sister, it missed me but Kathy –
Mr. Kolb: Kathy picked it up.
Mrs. Schmitt: The week we got a piano she came home from Woodland School, she was in Kindergarten and played a tune, and I went in, I was stunned. I said, “Kathy where’d you get that?” She said, “Ms. Carter played it at school today.” And I said, “Well, how did you know how to do it?” She said, “Your fingers know where to go. Don’t yours?” was her question. I said, “No, mine don’t.” And Jeff, all he wanted to do was grow up and buy an axe and knock the piano down. I made him take for two years. They started at the same time. All he wanted to do was chop it up in little pieces.
Mr. Kolb: You were lucky enough to have one child that was unique in that regard. Well, that’s great Toni. You’ve been very interesting and I thank you and you’ve got some wonderful stories.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well I could probably talk for my whole life –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know.
Mrs. Schmitt: – for hours on each and every – I’ve got so many incidents of the kids – that’s still going – well anyway, the kids say, “Mom, write a book.” But I don’t have time. I play bridge every day. You can turn that off.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that’s fine. Thank you, Toni.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF TONI SCHMITT
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
May 13, 2004
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Toni. Tell us a little bit about your family and your family’s background prior to Oak Ridge beginning in 1942. You were living in the area, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. Well, first of all, I was the fifth child of Benjamin Harrison Peters and Cleo Stair Peters. We lived across from the Magnet Mill. My father had always worked for newspapers, so when the mill started, they hired him to head the box department, so he made the boxes.
Mr. Kolb: In Clinton.
Mrs. Schmitt: In Clinton, and they made the boxes in Clinton for all the hosiery people all over, everywhere. Anyway, Oak Ridge at that time was a rural area and my mother’s sister, Lillian Stair Cassidy, owned the Peach Orchard, which is now still known as the Peach Orchard.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, up on West Outer Drive?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, off West Outer Drive. When I was a little girl, I picked peaches there for them, helped them harvest the peaches. Also in Clinton I had a music teacher and she taught me and she also taught Reba Holmberg who lives on Scenic Drive, I think. Okay, well we had the same piano teacher.
Mr. Kolb: Who was that?
Mrs. Schmitt: The teacher? Now Reba will remember the name of that teacher, but right now I can��t remember her name. She traveled around to the different homes. At that time, you didn’t go to her home; she came to your home. This area was a very rural area and they had a school, Robertsville, and I went to Clinton. We were competitive in basketball with this team, the kids from Robertsville. My dad was one of ten children, five boys and five girls. My dad’s father was Clerk and Master at the Courthouse in Clinton. I have no idea what the duties [were], but a very respected family. My mother was one of eight children, four boys and four girls. I’ve got so many cousins around here, it’s normal to run into two or three of them when I go out. But anyway, when I was in high school, I took subjects like shorthand, typing, bookkeeping, all clerical studies. The minute I graduated, I wanted to come to Oak Ridge and get a job, but I was only seventeen.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that?
Mrs. Schmitt: ’43. I was only seventeen years old, so I got a job in a law office in Clinton for lawyer Al Fox, and that was very interesting, the three months I spent there. But anyway, as soon as I was eighteen, which was September 10th in ’43, I came to Oak Ridge and I went up to the AEC Building. We called it the Castle on the Hill then, and Mr. LaSoure, because of my vast experience with the law –
Mr. Kolb: Three months
Mrs. Schmitt: Three months. He took me up to the legal section to be interviewed. Now this was some really interesting interview, because you must know that back then, we did not have television and the only time we heard anyone except East Tennessee people speak was on the radio, which you didn’t get a lot of different ethnic accents from the radio. So the man who was interviewing me was a Jewish man from New York City named Edward Diamond and during the interview he asked if I could take dictation and I said, “Yes I can.” So he said, “Do you have your pad?” And I said, “Yes I do.” So he dictated, but the problem was about every third word, I couldn’t understand what he said.
Mr. Kolb: His accent.
Mrs. Schmitt: Just couldn’t understand what he said at all, so I’d leave big blanks. Anyway I transcribed it, and when he read it, he leaned back in his chair and said, “Can you take dictation?” I said, “Yes sir.” “Can you type?” And I said, “Yes sir, and I can take dictation too.” I said, “I couldn’t understand a word you said.” He said, “I couldn’t understand a word you said either.” So anyway, he called Mr. LaSoure, and on the way back down to the personnel I kept saying, “I don’t have to work for him. I can work for anybody.”
Mr. Kolb: Except him.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, except him. So when we got down there, Mr. LaSoure said, “Mr. Diamond wants to know if you can start on Monday?” And I said, “He hired me?” I laughed. And he said, “Yes he did.”
Mr. Kolb: You worked for him?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, no, not exactly for him. I was assigned to Sergeant Glen Wiltrout, who incidentally is still alive, and I visited him last week, the week before Easter, in Washington, D.C. He lives in the district, still alive, and we had a wonderful talk last week. But anyway, I was assigned to Sergeant Wiltrout. After about a year, my boss, Sergeant Wiltrout, one day said, “Toni, have you ever wondered why when Mr. Diamond has company he always calls you to go get their coffee?” And I reflected on that and I said, “No, I have no idea.” He said, “He could call Polly or Bettie or Reba, but he always calls you. You never have wondered why?” And I said, “No.” He said, “He wants his visitors to hear how the natives speak.” Well that made me so mad, I was furious.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sake, like you were being made an example of.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and so I was very mad. A short time later, Mr. Diamond lost his secretary and he called me and he said, “Toni, how would you like to work for me?” Well at that time, Jim, I was young and stupid. Now I would say, “Absolutely,” but I said, “No sir.” Back then, we always used that phrase. That’s gone by the wayside now; it’s old fashioned. But I said, “No sir.” He said, “No sir!” I said, “No sir.” And he said, “Well, um, you realize that you’d be turning down a raise in pay and a raise in grade?” And I said, “Yes Sir.” And then he was sort of speechless. I don’t blame him [for] my stupidity at that time, but I said, “I’ll work for Mr. Sullivan though.” He was the Assistant Head of the Legal Section.
Mr. Kolb: And Diamond was the Head?
Mrs. Schmitt: Diamond was the Head. So I was assigned to Conrad Harrison Sullivan. But now I realize –
Mr. Kolb: Did you get along with Mr. Harrison?
Mrs. Schmitt: I got along with Mr. Diamond, too, except I was so upset with him when I thought he was just wanting people to hear how the natives speak. I was very sensitive about that then. Anyway, working up at the castle was great fun. I worked in the Legal Section. The Legal Section prepared all the contracts for all the different companies, and they always have a paragraph to scope of work. It was so vague that it was very odd, because when you got down to the scope of work, it would have what I call ‘Mickey Mouse speech’ and say the subcontractor would perform the work required to achieve the goal. It was all nothing, just nothing, nothing really. I have another interesting story about – not that I thought those were interesting – but I have a story my co-worker Bettie Coobs – do you know John Coobs, Jim?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mrs. Schmitt: He worked at X-10. Well anyway, Bettie was Mr. Diamond’s secretary. Bettie was very, very smart, and one day in general conversation Bettie said, “I think I know what they are making here.” And much to Mr. Diamond’s horror she said, “They’re going to split the atom and make a bomb out of it.” Later it was reported he just quaked in his boots, and after that meeting was over and Bettie had said that, he went to the higher ups and said, “My secretary has just said out in full language what we are doing here. I want you to come with a real tough security talk in a few days. Don’t come right today or tomorrow; she might know she’s right.” But anyway, the day that the bomb was announced was the day they were going to come talk to Bettie. So it all worked out; it was settled.
Mr. Kolb: This is late in the war.
Mrs. Schmitt: That was late in the war when she said that. But, Jim, I was disappointed that day, ’cause when we heard the news, I’m at work and I called Chuck, my husband, who knew what they were doing here due to his knowledge of it anyway. So I called Chuck, and instead of telling him they’ve announced that we are making bombs here and that they’ve made an announcement, I just said, “Chuck, you know what they’re making here? Atomic bombs.” Well he just hung up on me and I’m saying, “Chuck, Chuck…,” and he was gone. He thought, ‘She has,’ –
Mr. Kolb: You’d be in trouble.
Mrs. Schmitt: He just thought, ‘Oh gosh, they’ll be picking her up any minute now.’
Mr. Kolb: This is the day it was dropped?
Mrs. Schmitt: The day it was dropped and the news came out, and they hadn’t heard it at the plant yet. We had heard it up at the hill, and when I called him, I just said, “Chuck, you know what they’re making here?” I said, “Atomic bombs.” Oh, he just hung up.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he figured you were in trouble by you saying that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, yeah. Oh, he knew I was in trouble, big trouble.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s back up a little bit. You’ve gone all the way to the end of the war. Tell me about your living conditions when you first came to Oak Ridge. Where did you live and who did you live with and that kind of thing?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, when I came from Clinton at first I’d carpool with people but then –
Mr. Kolb: From Clinton?
Mrs. Schmitt: From Clinton, and of course when we got to the gate, the cars had to be searched ���cause there could be no – you had to have a badge to get in, you could not bring in liquor, you could not bring in cameras, and your car was searched, maybe not every day but periodically, so you had to be very careful. And there were signs all over: “Shhhh don’t tell anybody!” “Be quiet!” In other words, the only thing we could say was, “The grass is green and the sky is blue.” That’s about all we could say. But coming into Oak Ridge every morning was an experience, because you would come in one day and there would be a street with just bare land on it, and going home that night there’d be ten houses on it ’cause they went up. The cemesto – the people would come put the frame, they’d come slap the cemesto board and come with a roof, and they were doing a street a day. And all the streets back then were designed to be very short. They didn’t want any numbers of houses very high. And you know why that was?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mrs. Schmitt: They didn’t want people outside to think there was a lot of people here, so all the streets were short and they were all 110 to 120, and that was on purpose. Now some of them, a couple of them were higher, but –
Mr. Kolb: Well like West Outer, they had to be.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, but they tried to make it as small as they could.
Mr. Kolb: To cover up the number of people.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Now, there were three places to eat. You had three places you could eat, and they were all called ‘ptomaine taverns,’ because you were always getting the stomach virus.
Mr. Kolb: These were cafeterias?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, these three cafeterias: one in the East End, one in the West End, and the one in Central Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Near Jackson Square.
Mrs. Schmitt: Townsite. And they would do things like – those were huge places to eat and they would have all these people in there eating and on St. Patty’s Day you had green mashed potatoes which almost made you sick to look at it.
Mr. Kolb: Did you eat your breakfast and lunch and supper?
Mrs. Schmitt: If you ate out, you ate everything there ’cause that was all.
Mr. Kolb: But you probably ate your breakfast at home.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well I shortly moved into a dormitory. I moved into Bayonne Hall, and it was right across from that cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: In the East End?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, it was right across from the Castle. Right now it would be where the big Bechtel building is, the big building where Bechtel first started.
Mr. Kolb: Where SAIC is, on Lafayette Drive?
Mrs. Schmitt: No. It’s in Townsite behind the Blue Hound Grill. That big building.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Jackson Tower.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Well, that’s where there were three dormitories.
Mr. Kolb: That was gone when I came here.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, there were three dormitories. They had a big quad in front with grass, and people would sit, and Bayonne Hall was facing the road out there, and they had two sides.
Mr. Kolb: Were they all women’s dormitories?
Mrs. Schmitt: All women.
Mr. Kolb: So you were real close to Jackson Square?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and I would walk to the Castle. It was very interesting back then because the average age was so low.
Mr. Kolb: You were just eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and there were busloads of secretaries coming in here every day, a whole busload of women from eighteen to twenty-five or thirty; they were bringing them in from all over the place. Now, my husband was a New York City man.
Mr. Kolb: Right, and when did you meet and how?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, we met here at the tennis court. But I wanted to tell you a little bit about Chuck. He’d never been away from New York City and he had German parents who wanted him to never leave home and live with them forever.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Are you serious?
Mrs. Schmitt: Serious. He went to Queens College and when he graduated, they said, “Charlie, you do not have to leave home. If you will live with us, we will take care of you. You don’t have to worry about food or anything.”
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t want him to get married?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, no. They didn’t want him to leave home, even get a job. They didn’t even want him to get a job. So Chuck immediately got a job in a TNT plant in Ohio. But Chuck felt bad. The war was on, and after he got the job in the TNT plant, they wouldn’t let him – he wanted to join the Army, and they wouldn’t let him because he’s a valued employee. You see, making TNT. And so they –
Mr. Kolb: Chemical engineer, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. But he kept on begging them until they finally released him. He just wanted to go so bad.
Mr. Kolb: So he did join the Army.
Mrs. Schmitt: So he joined, volunteered, was put in the Chemical Warfare Corps in Alabama. So in Alabama, he trained with all these boys to go overseas. He went through basic training, a very stiff training. He is now at a port in New York City ready to go; he’s mentally and physically prepared.
Mr. Kolb: So he’s in the infantry?
Mrs. Schmitt: Chemical Warfare. So they call out two names before they get on the boat, Chuck Schmitt and Fred Worm, and they said, “You all are going to Knoxville, Tennessee.” Nobody ever said ‘Oak Ridge’ then. And they were given a piece of paper, and you know what I said a while ago, what they told them was, “Say nothing to anyone. The only thing you’re allowed to say is, ‘The sky is blue and the grass is green,’ and when you get to Knoxville, call this number.” So he was furious. Here he had given up a real good job to volunteer to go fight. Here he’s ready to get on the boat and he is called to come here.
Mr. Kolb: And he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
Mrs. Schmitt: And Tennessee, where in the world is Tennessee? That’s where they go barefoot and they live in shacks and have outhouses. So he moved in here. The first Saturday night he was here –
Mr. Kolb: What year was this now, when he moved in?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was in ’44. I met him in October 7th in ’44 at a Tennis Court dance.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Bill Pollock’s Tennis Court dance.
Mrs. Schmitt: A few days after he arrived, he went to that dance, and Bill Pollock had his Paul Jones and everybody made a circle, the women on the inside and the men on the outside. “Women go to your right when the music stops, men go to your left. Whoever you’re facing, dance with them.” So the first dance, I got Chuck, and the first thing he said to me was – I was pretty tall then – I’ve shrunk down now – he said, “I’m so happy to have a tall girl ’cause my knee doesn’t hit ’em in the stomach.” Not very romantic. The second thing he said was, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” I said, “Republican.” And that must have been the right answer.
Mr. Kolb: So you hit it off?
Mrs. Schmitt: We hit it off.
Mr. Kolb: Did his accent bother you much? I mean he’s from New York City.
Mrs. Schmitt: He couldn’t say anything. He put Rs in everything where it didn’t belong. He called oil “Earl.” And I had to educate him quite a bit.
Mr. Kolb: You changed him but he didn’t change you?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well he changed me a lot too. We were really good for each other. However, his mother and father were devastated because they didn’t even want him to leave home, so when he went to the war, the night before he left, he got his mother so drunk. They were up all night drinking. When Chuck went out the door, she said, “Bye Charlie,” and slumped over. But that wasn’t as nearly as unhappy as when she heard I was going to marry Chuck.
Mr. Kolb: Had she met you?
Mrs. Schmitt: No.
Mr. Kolb: Just the news that he was marrying a Tennessee girl.
Mrs. Schmitt: I take that back. She had met me. I forgot. I don’t think I was engaged; she didn’t know for sure he was going to marry me. But anyway, Chuck asked if I could go to New York on a visit, so I went, and they were terrible. They treated me terribly. Well, I had never – you know, in Tennessee you’ve got people like Jones, Brown, Smith, and they all like –
Mr. Kolb: Common folks.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, we didn’t have a variety of ethnic people, and I didn’t know that in German families, the man does no labor, absolutely none.
Mr. Kolb: Around the house you mean?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. Oh, it’s a disgrace if they do. At least in Chuck’s thinking.
Mr. Kolb: Well, my family is German and my father had a big garden, I know that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, he never did do anything inside.
Mr. Kolb: Not housework.
Mrs. Schmitt: In fact, if you were even caught hanging something out on a clothesline it was a disgrace for your family. So from my background, where my father helped my mother do everything, it was a different world up there. Needless to say, they hated me with a passion, and I didn’t find out till about twenty-five years after I was married that they were not invited to my wedding nor told about it.
Mr. Kolb: So they weren’t there, obviously.
Mrs. Schmitt: They weren’t there.
Mr. Kolb: They wouldn’t have come if they had been.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, no, they would’ve come, but Chuck said – I said, “Chuck, I didn’t know you didn’t ask your mother and father. You told me they couldn’t come.” He said, “Toni, they would have come, and when the minister said, ‘Does anyone have any reason why these people…,’ my father would’ve gotten up and told all a bunch of stuff.” So he said, “I couldn’t tell ’em.”
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure; did Chuck meet your family before you got married?
Mrs. Schmitt: He met my family, and of course they’re from a different background. Chuck went to my father and asked for my hand, unbeknownst to me, traditional way, and my Daddy was a big joker and he said, the answer was, “Well Chuck, you can have her. She’s not good for anything. She can’t do anything.” And he was saying that playfully, because I adored my father and my father was a wonderful person.
Mr. Kolb: That was all right. They hit it off okay?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah. My family had no problem. My mother taught us when we were little to – she said, “Now, you be careful who you marry, because I’m gonna like anyone you do, so you make sure you like ’em, ��cause I’m gonna like ’em,” which was good psychology.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back a little bit to your single days. You said you lived with three, two or three other girls, or how many girls lived together in that dormitory room?
Mrs. Schmitt: Do you know that I cannot even remember how many. I think we at least had two beds and we each had a roommate. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: And you lived there several years before you met Chuck and married?
Mrs. Schmitt: I lived there from ’43 till I married Chuck at the Chapel on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: About a year. But those single days, single years, tell us about those before you met Chuck, I mean, what you did and the atmosphere.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, there was a flurry of activity all the way into Oak Ridge because they had a full-time recreation department and they planned – it was mainly dances and get-togethers but there was a regular dance schedule: on Wednesday nights, a Tennis Court dance, and Saturday night was a big dance at the Grove Recreation Hall and Sundays –
Mr. Kolb: Where the Oak Terrace used to be, that big room?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had –
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Terrace, do you remember the Oak Terrace?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. That’s where it was. And on Sunday night, it was at the Ridge Rec Hall, and that’s right down from Chapel on the Hill. I don’t know what’s there now.
Mr. Kolb: Well is that where the public library was for a while?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. But back then, it was just all a rec hall, and I had my wedding reception in one of the rooms.
Mr. Kolb: Other than dancing, did you do any other recreation? Bowling?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had bowling, and I didn’t participate in that. I always loved dancing, so I went to all the dances, and sometimes – I remember one night, they had a magician, well, a hypnotist. He hypnotized a bunch of people, and that was very interesting. But to be hypnotized, you have to allow yourself to be hypnotized. You have to cooperate. But it was real interesting to see them doing – he told us all the things they’d be doing when they woke up, and it was really funny to see these people doing these various things that were not apropos. Very effective. It was high activity back then because of age. There were so many single young women like me and so many single men like Chuck. Now, Chuck lived at the barracks, and they had ball games and they had a little band and they had different things.
Mr. Kolb: A band?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had a band.
Mr. Kolb: You mean like a dance band?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, it was a marching band. Yeah, they had a little marching band.
Mr. Kolb: Was he in the SED?
Mrs. Schmitt: SED. Oh yeah. He was sent here. He was a soldier and he was ready to go –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I knew Grady Whitman was in the SED also.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah, he was in SED, and he lived down in the barracks. Let me tell you an interesting story. I don’t know whether it’s interesting for this or not, but Chuck had – call it ‘extra sensory perception.’ I’ll tell you about the incident that we experienced with him. My parents, before we were married, invited me and Chuck, on a Saturday, to go to the Smoky Mountains. They had rented a cabin and invited me and Chuck. They were going to treat us.
Mr. Kolb: Before you got married or after?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was before we got married. So we worked a half day on Saturday then. We worked till noon on Saturday, so Chuck had appeared at my office up at the AEC. I don’t know how we were going to get up to the Smokies. It’s funny how these little details – we were going and we had a way, but I don’t remember how. Anyway, Chuck showed up about an hour before time to get off. When he came in the room, he was just ashen, he looked – and my boss, Glen Wiltrout immediately said, “What’s wrong, Chuck?” And he said, “Nothing,” sort of like, but you didn’t believe it. I had already said that to him. Glen wasn’t in the room when he first came in. I said, “What’s wrong Chuck?” He said, “Nothing.” And I said, “Where did you go last night after you left me?” It looked like he had a hangover or he looked very distressed and very pale, but he denied knowing anything was wrong, and then when Glen came in and asked him, you know, we both knew something was wrong. So we were sitting there, and about ten minutes of twelve, the phone rang. It was the barracks, and they – at the barracks, they knew that Chuck and I were dating. Enough people knew it that when they were trying to find Chuck – Chuck had had a telegram from New York City saying, “Come home at once. Your father is on dying with a stroke.” They called about ten minutes before we were to leave, and he said, “Chuck, we have a car and going to pick you up and take you immediately to the airport. We’ve made arrangements for you to go home.” So Chuck just said, “Oh, I knew I wasn’t going to Gatlinburg, but I didn’t know why.” He had this ominous feeling. He was relieved. He said, “I knew, but I didn’t know why.” He had a foreboding of bad news, but he didn’t know what it was. But the minute he heard it, he said, “I knew I wasn’t going to the mountains.”
Mr. Kolb: So he went home. Did his father pass away?
Mrs. Schmitt: His father did not pass away that time. He lived longer, but he was always affected by the stroke. The early days here in Oak Ridge were very great. The thing that struck me, I met a lot of people, mainly I would say eighty percent of the people here were from somewhere else and they would badmouth this place and talk bad about it, and boy they couldn’t wait to get home.
Mr. Kolb: Of course the mud and all the other –
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, the mud, and the nothing to do compared to a city where they’re from.
Mr. Kolb: Of course Oak Ridge did create a Playhouse and had a symphony early on and those different things.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, they didn’t have any cultural advance at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Oh they didn’t? You mean not right away.
Mrs. Schmitt: In the beginning, no, and these people couldn’t wait to either get out of the Army and go home or whatever. Later, I would run into one of them, like Jack and Peggy Thompson; they could not wait to leave this place and go to New York City. So that’s all I heard. They lived across the street from me and Chuck. One day I ran into Jack down here and I said, “What are you doing down here?” I’d heard he’d gone back. He said, “Well, after we got back, it wasn’t the same anymore.” He said, “We longed to be back here.” That happened to a whole lot of people. They thought they wanted to go back.
Mr. Kolb: But then after they got back it wasn’t the same.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was just too hectic and they sort of reflected on the peaceful life they had here and the ease of life. You could get to where you’re going in ten minutes. So that’s how come now in Tennessee we’ve got all these Yankees here.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, not just Yankees, but people from all over.
Mrs. Schmitt: They’re here from all over. I am actually a minority in my Bridge Club here. I’m a minority; there are about three or four people native Tennesseans.
Mr. Kolb: Did any of your classmates in your high school class go to work in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes. Naomi Manning married Fred Wilt. He was about twenty years older than her. They’re both dead now, but she started working up at the Castle and she met Fred Wilt and married him. But not many of them did. I was surprised.
Mr. Kolb: The money was good, the best job you could get.
Mrs. Schmitt: I know a whole lot of the fellows got jobs at the plants, like Jig Seivers, and David Jennings, he had a big part down here. He was always a smart guy in school.
Mr. Kolb: He was in your high school?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. In my high school, your old standout, and he went on to college and had a nice job down here.
Mr. Kolb: Well how about things like rationing and waiting in line for various items?
Mrs. Schmitt: Okay, anytime, the rule was this: if you were out and about and saw a line, you just went over and stood in it and you didn’t care what they had, because whatever they were selling, if you didn’t want it, somebody you knew did.
Mr. Kolb: So you bought it and then you’d trade it.
Mrs. Schmitt: You just stood in line, and sometimes you were lucky and they had Fatima cigarettes. We couldn’t hardly find cigarettes, which was good back then but now it’s bad. Now, who cares?
Mr. Kolb: Did you smoke?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh absolutely, like a smoke stack. I smoked till my husband died and I quit. Very, very bad habit, but everybody I knew smoked then. You were odd if you didn’t smoke, so the pressure was on people to smoke.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you couldn’t get any stockings and that kind of thing, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Didn’t get any?
Mr. Kolb: Stockings. Silk stockings.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, I was lucky because my dad worked in the hosiery mill and I had all the stockings I needed. Over the counter, you couldn’t get it, things like sugar, meat, just little things like that. If we stood in line at the grocery store and got a ham hock, we were thrilled. We ate a lot of canned Spam, which I don’t care to eat now, and I’ll tell you about a funny night. Liquor was not sold or available anyway here, nor allowed, so one night Chuck and I were sitting out in front of Bayonne Hall after having gone to a dance at the Grove one Saturday night, and here came a man walking down the walkway with a tray and an ice bucket and several bottles of Gin, Vermouth, Jack Daniels.
Mr. Kolb: Out in the open?
Mrs. Schmitt: Out in the open, and it was midnight, and he walked down, walked right up to where we were sitting on the bench, sat the tray down and said, “What would you like?” So I told him, “I want a margarita.” And I forgot what Chuck got. Anyway, as people were returning from the dance, it started with me and Chuck, it ended up we had about twenty people there. As they came home, he’d say, “Hey, would you like a drink?” He said, “I’m spreading good will.” So he depleted his supply, and then he said, “Everybody come up to my apartment.” And that was where the Blue Hound Grill is right now, I think the building right beside it [that] they’re renting now, is where he lived. Twenty or thirty people followed him right up there to the apartment. The worst thing about this, we didn’t leave there till about four in the morning and we were all drunk, so Chuck is walking me back to the dorm, both of us drunk, when Brooks Bowen and Helen, his girlfriend, came out the door and said, “Hey, want to go fishing on Norris Lake?” We said, “Absolutely!”
Mr. Kolb: Right then?
Mrs. Schmitt: Right then. We got in the car. So in the middle of the fishing trip, about eleven o’clock out on Norris Lake, I said, “Oh no, I was supposed to work today for Colonel Vandenbock.”
Mr. Kolb: You forgot?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was a work day. I didn’t have a thought about it and I’m up there on the middle of the lake and I was supposed to be at work at eight that Saturday morning to work for him.
Mr. Kolb: And you missed it? Yeah, I guess so.
Mrs. Schmitt: I never heard a word about that. I never heard anything about it. I guess they just thought I forgot it or something.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you did.
Mrs. Schmitt: I did.
Mr. Kolb: This man, he’s an entrepreneur?
Mrs. Schmitt: He was just this man.
Mr. Kolb: Just making money?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, he didn’t charge; it was all free. He was spreading good will. He said, “I’m here to spread some good will.”
Mr. Kolb: So he paid for the liquor and just –
Mrs. Schmitt: He had all this liquor. I don’t know how he got it in.
Mr. Kolb: Did this happen just once or did it happen more than once?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh just one time, just a one-time occasion.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I’m sure that word would spread pretty fast.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, it was a memorable occasion. What little I can remember of it. Jim, I was young and stupid back then. I would forget my badge all the time, all the time, and to go in the gate we always pinned our badge underneath our coat, so we’d flash our coat open.
Mr. Kolb: This is just to get into work, you mean?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, when I was still living in Clinton, and getting down here, coming in and out, or if I went out to Big Ridge with a group, I was always forgetting my badge. It was okay if I knew it, because I’d say, “Oh, I don’t have my badge. I’ll have to distract the guard.”
Mr. Kolb: You’d get through without –
Mrs. Schmitt: All the time. I don’t know how many times, I’d flash my coat and then say, “Hey, did you all hear about that dog down there that ….” You know, I’d –
Mr. Kolb: Distract them.
Mrs. Schmitt: I’d distract them. So then one day, I was at work, I had gotten in without my badge, just easy like I always did by distracting. I was leaving with my boss, Glen Wiltrout. We were going out at the same time, and I was busy talking to Glen, and you know I never have trouble talking. So I held my coat open while I’m talking to Glen and I walk on by, only I forgot I didn’t have a badge, and when I walk on by, this guard computes it and he said, “Hey, you, you didn’t have a badge under there!” So I start running. I ran to the car. Well the next day, Glen –
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t follow you?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, they didn’t, but Glen – ’cause by then they sort of knew you – but Glen said, “Toni, you are going to get killed coming in and out. You must start wearing your badge.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try to think of it.” But that was just funny. I forgot to buzz him off, you know.
Mr. Kolb: So the guards could be distracted. Of course, there are so many people coming.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and especially if you distract them.
Mr. Kolb: Boy, you lived a little dangerously. You mentioned that you and Chuck got married at the Chapel on the Hill, which is an interdenominational church at that time.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes, well we only had chapels at that time, no denomination.
Mr. Kolb: Now Chuck’s religion is Lutheran, I guess. What was yours? Baptist background?
Mrs. Schmitt: I was born a Baptist, raised a Baptist. No mention was ever said of Lutheran or Baptist. Stuart Rule was a Baptist minister who did marry us, and I knew he was a Baptist minister in the area. Maybe he gave talks at that chapel. Anyway, he married me, and Chuck had no thing to say in it, or he didn’t mention anything about it. But the reason I became Lutheran, Chuck was so fervent in his religion that he wouldn’t miss a church service, and this impressed me ’cause as a young feisty girl, we would be up all night dancing, and sometimes I didn’t care to go to church in the morning. So I just, after I married Chuck – another thing, very few Lutherans ever change their religion. But I’m of the opinion that I think a family should go to the same church, so I joined Chuck’s church and I love that church.
Mr. Kolb: Where was that? In East Village did you worship?
Mrs. Schmitt: We worshipped in East Village and when, actually, Pastor Walter Grum came and dug for the church where it is now. They laid the ground, cut the ground, and put the cornerstone in.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Toni, now we talked about you getting married and then you and Chuck joined the Lutheran church you said after that. I guess your life changed dramatically after you got married. I mean, I’m sure you still went to dance, but did you have your family right away or how did that go?
Mrs. Schmitt: I worked, we were married in ’45 and –
Mr. Kolb: Before the end of the war?
Mrs. Schmitt: That was right after, and I continued working until I became pregnant with my first child, which – my first child was born in ’47; I married in ’45. When I learned that I was going to have a baby, I quit work because –
Mr. Kolb: And you were still working for the same man?
Mrs. Schmitt: I was working for – Mr. Diamond had gone. I was working for Mr. Sullivan at AEC. At that time, when I think back about that, that’s like the dark ages, because we transmit material, information today by fax, by e-mail –
Mr. Kolb: Electronically.
Mrs. Schmitt: Electronically, and then I was married and I did not know I was pregnant, but my boss called me in, said, “These important papers have to be in Washington, D.C. tomorrow. I’m going to put you on a train tonight.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, send you as a courier?
Mrs. Schmitt: They sent me as a courier. So when I got up there and delivered my message, Glen Wiltrout, my first boss, had already gone back to Washington. The war was over. So I went to see Glen and visit him.
Mr. Kolb: Was this in the Atomic Energy Commission Office up there?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, I went to his home. They had me out to his home, he and Frankie. I knew his family well because he had his family down here when he was my boss and his wife was a nurse. So anyway, they prepared this nice dinner for me that night, and when I sat down to eat, I said, “Frankie, I can’t eat this.” I was puzzled because I was a big eater, and she looked at me and she said, “Toni, come with me.” So I went with her and –
Mr. Kolb: Did you not have any appetite or what?
Mrs. Schmitt: I just said, “I can’t eat this.” I said, “I don’t know why.” I couldn’t eat it and that was all I told her, I couldn’t eat it. I think it was something fried. Anyway, I didn’t know why I couldn’t eat it. She knew why. She took me upstairs and she said, “Toni, do you know that you’re pregnant?” I said, “I am?” And I was thrilled, I was thrilled to death.
Mr. Kolb: And she was right?
Mrs. Schmitt: She was right. I came right home and went to a doctor. I was so young and stupid I didn��t know you went to a gynecologist to deliver your baby.
Mr. Kolb: You always had them at home?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, I knew you went to the hospital, but I went to see a doctor and he was a doctor from Texas and he was a big – Duvall was his name – he was a tall, good looking doctor, and when I went to see him he said, “No, you’re not pregnant.” Well I burst into tears and I cried so hard I couldn’t stop crying and he said, “What is wrong with you? Every time I tell a young person that they want to hug my neck and kiss me when I tell them they’re not pregnant.” And that made me cry even harder, and finally he didn’t know what to do with me, ’cause men feel so helpless when a woman is broken hearted. I was broken hearted. And he said, “Well, do you want to kill the rabbit?” I didn’t know what that meant, but back in those ancient days, the only way they could really tell for sure you were pregnant was to inject the rabbit, and then they somehow could tell. So I said, “Yes, I want to kill the rabbit.” So three days later I came back and he said, “You’re pregnant.” So I burst into tears all over again and cried buckets because I was so happy and he just –
Mr. Kolb: So he had been wrong the first time?
Mrs. Schmitt: He had been wrong, and Frankie my friend in Washington, Glen Wiltrout’s wife, Frankie Wiltrout had been right. But anyway, the upshot of the thing was that he told me later – or Dr. Reagan, who delivers babies – what do they call that? Not pediatrician. Obstetrician is that what they call them.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: Obstetrician. Well, see, I had trouble because when Jeff came, he was breech birth, and Dr. Duvall called in Dr. Reagan, and Dr. Reagan told me that my baby wouldn’t have lived if he hadn’t called him in. But this man said, “I would never want to tell that women she lost her baby,” because I had cried and cried.
Mr. Kolb: Did they do a Cesarean?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, they didn’t, but he just knew how to do it I guess. ’Cause back then when we went to the doctor, you went – in the early days – this is before then, before this period – you would go – you didn’t have a doctor. You had any Army doctor that they assigned you to, and I had a very bad experience with that. I don’t even know whether I should repeat it. You can knock out anything you don’t want. I went to get my license to be married or to get my blood test, and when the doctor got the results, he said to me, “Well, who did you have intercourse with?” And I said, “Nobody.” And he treated me real hatefully. He insisted I had, and he was making fun of me. He said, “You don’t catch this from a toilet seat.” And I just kept telling him that. I said, “Well I don’t care. That’s wrong.” So I kept persisting. I said, “Your test is wrong. Now, you just take another one,” ’cause I knew –
Mr. Kolb: What did he claim you had?
Mrs. Schmitt: He claimed I had a venereal disease, and he claimed, you don’t get this off a toilet seat and your test shows something. And I said, “Well the test is wrong.” But anyway, it really hurt me deeply. He didn’t believe it was wrong, but he did another test and it was wrong.
Mr. Kolb: The second test was right.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah. But I was – back then, my name was very valuable. I was brought up under the old rule that once your name is – you didn’t mess around.
Mr. Kolb: Not like that.
Mrs. Schmitt: Not like today. But anyway, that stayed with me a long, long time, that feeling of degrading or whatever.
Mr. Kolb: Those army doctors, they had an interesting –
Mrs. Schmitt: He was tough. He really thought that I was loose person.
Mr. Kolb: How did these security aspects, the secretness – you told me about how your husband had guessed – but going back when you first were employed, working in this very tense atmosphere, I mean, you couldn’t talk about what you did, and you’re a talkative person. How did this affect you?
Mrs. Schmitt: They had, did you know this, that they had WACs sitting in an office, Women Army Corp, sitting in an office doing nothing but reading every newspaper in the world, every day.
Mr. Kolb: Here in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, the crew was here in Oak Ridge, all they did was read newspapers. Any mention of nuclear, any mention of anything even connected with any of the ingredients to make a bomb, they would visit these people and warn them like, “Don’t mention anything like this.”
Mr. Kolb: How did you find this out?
Mrs. Schmitt: My boss told me that. I was in legal, and he said they had this crew and all they did was read newspapers, and one lady in Oak Ridge was going to name her child Urania and she wasn’t allowed to. They made a visit on her.
Mr. Kolb: Did she know something about uranium?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know whether she knew or not but they didn’t want it. Every textbook was taken out of every library all over the country on any subject like that. Did you know that? The government went into every library all over the country. Any reference to any of the ingredients of a bomb, they took the books out.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Schmitt: They did.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: But Toni, did you know, I’ve been told that – I think it’s true – that the Army had Army Intelligence personnel people positioned in every group as spies?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yes I did, and I have a story to tell you about it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, were you aware of that?
Mrs. Schmitt: No, not till later. Okay, my husband worked in a group headed by Seymour Smiley, he was head of the department.
Mr. Kolb: Which plant was this?
Mrs. Schmitt: This was at K-25, and so had an employee named Don Brader. Don had the florist out at Bruner’s for a long time, Brader Greenhouse. Don Brader was an agent, CIA agent, but he was all dressed up like a GI. He got a check from them every week, which he tore up, from the plant. He was a plainclothesman – I forgot – I messed up the story. He was an employee and he was in plainclothes, and he got a check every week which he tore up because he was really a soldier, but he was on the CIA. He and Sy Smiley were best friends. They did everything together. One day after the war, Don went to Sy and said, “Sy, I need to be off next week. I’m going to be discharged from the Army.” And Sy says, “What do you mean from the Army? You’re not in the Army. You get a check every week here.” He said, “I’ve been in the Army and I’m a spy.” And Sy was so mad at him, he was furious. He said, “You mean you’ve been spying on me this whole time?” And Don said, “Yep.”
Mr. Kolb: You and a lot of other people
Mrs. Schmitt: And he said, “What about the checks you get every week?” Don said, “I had to tear them up. I ripped them up when I got them.”
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause he got another check from the Army.
Mrs. Schmitt: He was in the Army. I knew that firsthand.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause I’d had people, you know –
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, they found out later.
Mr. Kolb: They had some funny expression for these spies, the Army whatever. Of course, you didn’t know who was who.
Mrs. Schmitt: No, you didn’t know it. They didn’t know until Don Brader was going to be discharged, and Sy was just floored. In fact, he was mad ’cause he thought, he’s such a good friend, he should have been told. But no, he was never told. A thing about Oak Ridge we haven’t mentioned was the safety you felt since everybody –
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause it was in the closed, guarded –
Mrs. Schmitt: No door was ever locked, cars were never locked, nothing was ever locked, and it was a great feeling, which – that changed.
Mr. Kolb: But was there no thieves in this town? I mean, certainly they could take advantage of other people.
Mrs. Schmitt: I guess not. Well, everybody had a badge and they were known. I don’t know why. No, we didn’t hear of anything like that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, of course probably you would have traveled fast if there had been somebody, and there probably were a few.
Mrs. Schmitt: There might have been, but we never heard of any. Colonel Vandenbock was head of our department. He was over my boss, Ed Diamond, ’cause he was the big director of the whole legal and some other sections. I was invited to a dance at UT one night with another girl and we were invited, as ROTC fellows at UT invited us, and I didn’t have an evening gown. I heard that Colonel Vandenbock’s secretary had an evening gown. She was tall and slender, about my size, so I went down. Sherry was her name. I forget her last name. So I said, “Sherry, I need to borrow an evening gown.” “Sure, I’ve never even worn it, Toni, but you’re welcome to it.” So she gave it to me. My friend already lived in Knoxville and I was to meet her at UT that night. So I had my box, the evening gown in a box, and I took a bus to Solway gate, ’cause I was going to UT. A car came by and said, “Going to Knoxville? Come on get in.” So the first car that came, and it’s a man driving all alone. I said, “Going to Knoxville?” And he [said], “Get in.��� So I put my evening gown on the back seat. Well, I was busy talking to him. Like I said before, I never have any trouble talking, and I was talking to him about everything. I found everything about him except where he lived. Knew where he worked and I knew his first name, but I didn’t – the bottom line, I got out of that car, waved goodbye and he went off with my dress, Sherry’s dress, brand new dress that I had borrowed. And back then, money was very scarce and you just didn’t have money to buy an evening gown. In fact, Sherry was well thought of, ’cause word was out that she had one.
Mr. Kolb: Did you recover it?
Mrs. Schmitt: Absolutely. But how? I got up at four o’clock the next morning and took a bus to Solway Gate and every car that came in, I waited for him to come in. I said, “There he is” to the guard.
Mr. Kolb: Did he have the dress?
Mrs. Schmitt: When he saw me, he said, “Shewww, boy, did you almost get me in trouble last night.” He said, “My wife wanted to go to the movie,” and he said, “If I hadn’t gone out first and found your dress ….” He was getting it out of the trunk when he was telling me this. He said, “I went out first. If I hadn’t done that and had time to hide it in my trunk, I could never explain that dress to my wife.”
Mr. Kolb: I bet.
Mrs. Schmitt: So he opened the trunk and handed it to me.
Mr. Kolb: So you went to the dance without the dress?
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, without the dress. So I came back the next morning and put in on Sherry’s desk and I said, “It’s in top condition, never been out of the box, Sherry.” That’s just one of the stupid things I did.
Mr. Kolb: That is crazy. That was a close shave.
Mrs. Schmitt: Very close shave. I was so happy I got it back.
Mr. Kolb: So this was a complete stranger.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, it was a complete stranger, and you never once thought he could be a killer or –
Mr. Kolb: Right, right.
Mrs. Schmitt: Nobody would ever hear from me again. We never even thought in terms like that. Now, you wouldn’t do that.
Mr. Kolb: Of course not.
Mrs. Schmitt: But then it was okay.
Mr. Kolb: Well these situations that you fall into make a lasting impression, that’s for sure.
Mrs. Schmitt: I was trying to think of anything else of interest I could tell you.
Mr. Kolb: Well let me ask you about when in ’49 and the gates were finally opened, leading up to that, as I recall, there was a vote, a referendum on whether the city should be opened up, and do you remember that?
Mrs. Schmitt: I have no recollection of that. I probably – that was when my second baby was being born. Jeff was born in ’47, Kathy was in ’49, and I wasn’t aware of it.
Mr. Kolb: Well they had a referendum, and as I understand it, the first vote was turned down. The people didn’t want it to change; they wanted –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, it had to soak in for a while I think. We felt secure here.
Mr. Kolb: Well sure, but you remember when the event of the gates opening, the big parade?
Mrs. Schmitt: I remember the big parade and I was in line right on the turnpike to see it. I was somewhere near where Illinois Avenue, not Illinois but Lafayette Drive and where the Baptist Church is, I was standing right there when the motor parade went by.
Mr. Kolb: Saw the movie stars and all that kind of thing.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, that was a great day.
Mr. Kolb: Big hoopla. Yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: The biggest thing about Oak Ridge I thought was the people stayed here. The people had come here from everywhere, stayed, and the ones that went back came back. I don’t know how many people I knew like Peggy and Jack Thompson that they couldn’t wait to leave. They came back.
Mr. Kolb: Went back to New York City –
Mrs. Schmitt: And they didn’t like it anymore. They had something to compare it to. And Knoxville finally accepted us for a long time.
Mr. Kolb: Well now, you being a native Tennessean, you should have had no problem going to Knoxville like some of the other Yankees.
Mrs. Schmitt: I didn’t have any problem over at Knoxville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, how about Chuck?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, Chuck would not communicate with people when we’d go in. He’d say, “Toni you talk,” because see, Yankees at that time did not know how to converse with the Tennessee people. With Tennessee people, you don’t just go in and state your business. If you go in a store, you have to have some little leading up to it, like –
Mr. Kolb: How you doing?
Mrs. Schmitt: “Nice day we’re having today” and some little extra thing, and Chuck didn’t know the code on that, so he would say, “Toni, you go in and talk.”
Mr. Kolb: More effective for you. But he was accepted by your whole relationship, huge relationship. I bet it was a bit of a challenge for him to keep up with just who your family members were.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was.
Mr. Kolb: A challenge for you at times.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, because he was an only child.
Mr. Kolb: He was an only child?
Mrs. Schmitt: He was an only child. At his home, his plate was served in the kitchen and placed in front of him. When I was there, everybody had to have bowls on the table, his plate was served, and never in his life �� every day his clothes were laid out for him.
Mr. Kolb: His mother just took care of it.
Mrs. Schmitt: At night when he studied, he had a big container of peanut butter, huge container, and a huge container of pickled herring that he could eat while he was studying. And if he asked for anything, if they were on an outing, if he asked for an ice cream cone, Pop would say “Have four, I’ll get you four.” Chuck was always embarrassed by this. First of all, he was embarrassed by his lunch at school because the meat would be much thicker than the bread, and everybody was saying “Where you getting those sandwich Charlie?” And he was ashamed of it. Then when they’d go out, even when I went to visit, if we were out to the zoo or something, went to an ice cream shop, and if you ordered anything, “Bring her two banana splits, and bring one for yourself,” he’d tell the waiter. So you learned with this kind of parent, when they ask you if you want an ice cream cone, you say, “No thank you,” ’cause you’re so embarrassed. And I learned that very quickly up there ’cause when I went to visit in New York, there were several things that I found different. We had never heard of anything but French’s Mustard and they had Gulden’s, and when I tasted it, I thought it was wonderful. So I commented, I said, “This is a wonderful mustard,” and so I got a case of it. Everything I said –
Mr. Kolb: They’d overwhelm you with whatever.
Mrs. Schmitt: That is exactly right. See, and they’re the ones that wanted Chuck to live there forever and “We’ll take care of you.” Another thing I admired, they had Lady Godiva Chocolates. Well down here, we’d never heard of those, and I commented how good they were. Well, I got about ten boxes. So you learned quickly. He was really spoiled rotten. He didn’t live in the real world.
Mr. Kolb: Was that hard for you? I mean he had to adjust –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, first of all, it was so different from my background, where we were taught entirely different and very much loved. While you might call that love, it wasn’t because –
Mr. Kolb: It’s creating a dependency wasn’t it?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well no, on the other hand, he had no freedoms. Once, when he came home from a Boy Scout meeting, he was late, and when they asked him why he didn’t get home on time, he said all the Boy Scouts went with the Girl Scouts to the ice cream parlor, and he received a beating for that because they didn’t want him associating with girls. Once, he was put in the cellar in the coal bin, in the cellar where there were rats, for some minor thing. See, they were real hard on him at one place but real lenient on the other. So anyway, the neighbor called the policeman and they came to the house and they told Pop, said, “You get him out of that coal bin.” And everyone was afraid his father was a tyrant. Everyone was afraid of him. So Chuck was afraid of him too.
Mr. Kolb: He was probably glad to get down here to Tennessee.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, once, we were on the street and we met his doctor, and Chuck introduced me to him, and we talked a few minutes, and he said to Chuck, “Chuck the luckiest thing you’ve ever done in your life was to go to Tennessee and marry this little lady.”
Mr. Kolb: I bet.
Mrs. Schmitt: Right away he said that. But see, the first time I entered Chuck’s house, all the light bulbs, overhead light bulbs, which – they didn’t have fixtures – were painted red. You could hardly see in their house. All the activity was around the dining room table, and luckily it had a bay window with three windows so it wasn’t too dark, but at night, the red light bulb. They claimed it hurt their eyes, the light. The first night I was there – I am nineteen years old when I am there – I never tasted a drink of liquor. Baptists don’t drink, and they’re brought up not to drink; they don’t drink wine even. So there was a knock on my door after I went to bed, and Mom Schmitt said, “Take this bottle for a night cap.” I said, “Oh no, Mrs. Schmitt, I don’t drink.” She said, “Never mind, take this, take it, take it and have a little drink.” And I said, “No thank you, I don’t drink.” I thought it was awful to drink. And so she said, “Well, just set it on your dresser.” So I did. So two or three days, each day Chuck was getting more aloof with me, more aloof and more aloof. One day we were riding the subway into Manhattan and he was so withdrawn, and I said, “What’s wrong, Chuck?” And he said, “Nothing.” So we went on in. We went on the top of the Empire State Building and we’re looking down at all these little yellow taxis, when I say, “Chuck something is wrong and I want to know what it is, and tell me.” So he said, ���Well, I don’t think it’s very nice what you’ve been doing.” I said, “Now, what have I been doing?” He said, “Well, first of all, you asked my mother for a bottle.” And I didn’t deny; I just listened. And he said, “Second, you left a personal object in the bathroom for her to have to get rid of. That was to insult her. And third, when Uncle Freddy came to visit, you appeared in your pajamas.” I had pajamas and a lounging robe on. So apparently only a woman of ill repute would do these things. So I didn’t deny any of them, but I just looked at Chuck and I know fire was flashing out of my eyes, and I said, “Do you believe your mother?” And I was just waiting, and he looked at me and he said, “No.”
Mr. Kolb: He was smart enough to know what to say.
Mrs. Schmitt: I never did deny any of the accusations. I just will never forget the moment that I looked down at the taxi cabs and I thought for a long minute, and then I said, “Chuck,” – he had given me a ring at that time, while I was there – I said, “Chuck, I do not think I want to marry you unless you promise I will never have to live within 300 hundred miles of your parents.” And he repeated that. He said, “Toni, you will never have to live within 300 miles of my parents.”
Mr. Kolb: So they were more than a day’s drive away.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, and every morning, she’d take him down in the basement: “Fine woman you send here, fine woman. You know what she did? She left this stuff in the bathroom opened for me to have to put away.” And then the next day she said, “Coming out in pajamas in front of Uncle Freddy. A good woman doesn’t do that.” And you know it was a perfectly nice robe over pajamas.
Mr. Kolb: They would have been happier if –
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh they hated me; they hated me on sight.
Mr. Kolb: Well you made the best of it, I guess.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, due to my upbringing, where my mother said, “When you marry a man, you marry his family. Don’t think you don’t.” She said, “If these people have raised your husband, they’re the parents and you have to like them.” So I ignored it. I totally ignored what they did. I wrote them one letter every week.
Mr. Kolb: You did?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did Chuck ever write them?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know. I don’t think he ever wrote them much, but I wrote a letter a week and sent – and by the time they died – Pop died first, Mom died – if she wanted anything, it was Toni. She called Toni. “Would you get me some water? Would you do this?”
Mr. Kolb: You brought her around.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, it took a long time. One time when the children were about teenagers she said to me, “Toni, we did not know what to do when we had Chuck. We did not raise him right, but you are raising your children so well.” She realized it after all that.
Mr. Kolb: Well that’s a – I knew there was a big cultural divide. Well, Toni, only one more thing here. You did say earlier that you’d heard indirectly about the project being about the Atomic Bomb, but when you did – well, and Chuck heard about it at work – you said the day – well, he knew about it before. Did he guess it or did he [know it]?
Mrs. Schmitt: He guessed it, what they were doing. He guessed it.
Mr. Kolb: But he didn’t discuss it with anyone.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh no, never said a word, didn’t even say any word the day of –
Mr. Kolb: Well, when it actually happened and the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, what was the atmosphere? What did you do that day?
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, everyone was jubilant and they celebrated.
Mr. Kolb: Did you leave work early?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh, work was just chaos. I mean, we were there, but everybody was just whooping and hollering and talking and –
Mr. Kolb: It was like a party atmosphere.
Mrs. Schmitt: That was just a big party day.
Mr. Kolb: That night, was there a party in town?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t remember what I did that night, but I’m sure of it. I don’t have a good memory for stuff like that particular night. I remember the day of the parade, when I was watching the parade go by, but we were always going out to the dances, so I’m sure we were at a dance that night. Everyone was jubilant over the news. We were happy they ended the war, and we had to find out later that it wasn’t very kosher to say that you’d built the atomic bomb. We learned later when we went different places and different states to downplay that because it wasn’t looked on favorably by everybody else.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah. You had to be careful. It was brought to our attention several times, like when we were in Arizona some place, we’d get negative vibes on that.
Mr. Kolb: Was this right away or years later?
Mrs. Schmitt: It was two or three years later, after the furor over the news died down. We learned to sort of – we’d say we’re from Oak Ridge, but we wouldn’t add Home of the Atomic Bomb. Well, they found out here, you know, they changed it. They had to get away from that aspect, ’cause now we do mostly research. But it wasn’t very popular. In fact, in schools today, when my children were in school, they had to report on – my grandchildren had to do reports on what we thought about the atomic bomb, and I had to write for Emily, when she was in school, my thoughts, which she gave at school from my aspect, and they studied that, and I guess people are still debating whether that was good or bad.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s been a lot of revisionist historians, you might say. You look back and you say in perfect, perfect, 20/20 hindsight, Truman should have done this and any other thing, but they don’t realize that the stress that was going on – and he didn’t know everything that was going on. Sure the Japanese were trying to – the Emperor was trying to find a way to get out of the war, and the military people were not, of course, but you know he didn’t know how fast they were going to move. You didn’t know all these things, so you can’t or you shouldn’t fault. But people like to do that; they like to second guess and create controversy. The Enola Gay was not accepted in the Smithsonian for a while because it was controversial.
Mrs. Schmitt: I know; that’s what I’m saying. We found out that you don’t always brag about, “We built the atomic bomb here.” You think any of this is worthwhile?
Mr. Kolb: Of course, this is fantastic, Toni. This is what we want and need. Yes, it is worthwhile. This is what historians will look back on when we’re all dead and gone; they’ll look back at these personal remembrances. So just before we wrap up then, any other unique experiences you want to maybe throw out about the WWII period at the time or that era of Oak Ridge? I guess you would agree that Oak Ridge was a unique community, right?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh –
Mr. Kolb: How’s it unique?
Mrs. Schmitt: Not only the ��� Oak Ridge saved this part of the country. Back then, there was no work anywhere, hardly.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, the economic impact –
Mrs. Schmitt: And it gave us a boost to put us where we are today, really, and before, when I was growing up, everything was just sleepy little city around here.
Mr. Kolb: If you hadn’t gotten a job here, what were you thinking about becoming or trying to do?
Mrs. Schmitt: I probably would have been a secretary somewhere, probably had to go to Knoxville or something like that. I was real happy that I could come down here. I think Oak Ridge did so much for this area.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe it wasn’t appreciated at the time by the locals in Clinton and Knoxville.
Mrs. Schmitt: Probably not. I bet they all appreciate it now.
Mr. Kolb: We are all so different.
Mrs. Schmitt: That’s true.
Mr. Kolb: And you made a lot of friends from all over.
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh yeah, all over. I worked for ORTEC for a long time, you know, and I worked in personnel, and I was responsible for introducing all these different people to things to do in Oak Ridge. We would recruit physicists from Hungary, Italy, Germany, Japan, and I would – when they would come here to work – well, I was in charge of getting their visas, and then when they came, I would take them around and “show them the ropes” so to speak. And a lot of those people are still here today. Mario Martini and Judy – I don’t know if you know them – they are from Italy.
Mr. Kolb: Judy Martini, I know of them.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well that’s one family. The Elads – that was a Jewish family. An interesting fact: this man came from Hungary to work, and he was a well known scientist, but he could only come out. He had permission to come out and work at ORTEC, but his wife and children couldn’t come. He could bring with him a child or a wife, but if he brought the wife, he couldn’t bring the children; brought the children, he couldn’t bring the wife.
Mr. Kolb: That doesn’t make any sense. Is it because of lack of housing?
Mrs. Schmitt: Oh no. It was because [of] the communist country.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah.
Mrs. Schmitt: Hungary was a communist [country]. So anyway, Alexander Deize came. I took Alex all around, showed him all the ropes, and he lived here for a long time, and then he went back to Hungary. Now, four years has passed and my daughter graduates from UT, and she went to Connecticut to a music camp and she called one day and said, “Mom, I’ve been offered a Ford Foundation Scholarship and it consists of a year study in Boston learning Hungarian and then a year in Hungary where the composer Kodaly lived. It’s a method of teaching music, voice to children, similar to how they teach violin, hands on. And she said the only thing I have to do is guarantee that when I finish the two year course, I will teach in a school system that uses this method. So when she said Hungary, I knew that that was very interesting, and I said, “Kathy I know someone in Hungary, Alexander Deize.” So Kathy did the year in Boston and she learned to speak Hungarian. Then she went to Hungary and Alex helped her get housing, and he helped her like I had helped him.
Mr. Kolb: Payback.
Mrs. Schmitt: It was a payback day. And it was so nice that, and in the meantime, we’d made plans to go visit Kathy, and Chuck was at Y-12 in weapons development. Now this is a facet where it got into trouble. We had no thought of anything being illegal or anything, so I wrote Washington for visas. Chuck and I were going to go over. So in about three weeks at work, a man came to Chuck and said, “Come to the board room at five o’clock after work or 4:30 when you get off.” And Chuck thought, oh, they’re going to give me a raise. So Chuck goes in, and all these people are sitting around this big table and they’re all solemn looking and they say, “We understand you have a visa to go into Hungary.” And Chuck said, “Yes.” And they proceeded to tell him that, “We cannot tell you not to go,” but they indicated if he did that he wouldn’t have a job when he got back. And then they said, “Now, this is what��s going to happen to you if you go in there. If you go in there, somebody’s going to arrange to meet you, and they’re going to drug you, and they’re going to get –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, get information.
Mrs. Schmitt: Pick your brain.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t go?
Mrs. Schmitt: Chuck didn’t go. So Chuck came home and told me this. He said, “Toni, I can’t go in, but they said don’t write and tell Kathy that I can’t come in ’cause they might hold you if they know that I was that important or had that much information.” So anyway, I said, “Well I’ve got to tell Kathy in some way before I go over there because she’ll be so disappointed.” So I write this letter and I say, “Now, Kathy, here are our plans. Listen carefully. We are going to be leaving Connecticut so-and-so. We are arriving in so-and-so. Will you do this, will you do that?” And then I switch down in there, I say, “I will be arriving in Hungary at Budapest at such-and-such and such-and-such,” and then in the next paragraph said, “We will be going from there to such.” So she goes up to Alexander Deize’s house that night with the letter and said, “Alex, listen to this letter from my mother. That sounds so self-centered when my mother says I, I.” And she said, “And my mother’s not like that.” He said, “Kathy, your father isn’t coming.” He got it right.
Mr. Kolb: He figured it out.
Mrs. Schmitt: He figured it out. I thought that was really interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So the message got through.
Mrs. Schmitt: The message got to her, but Alex had to tell her. So when I met Kathy, somebody had met Kathy and her friend, her roommate, about two weeks before we were to arrive and expressed a big interest, and found out that her parents were going to come visit and made plans to meet them. They wanted to meet them and everything, and Kathy knew right away that it was the underdog. But Chuck waited in Germany on me when I went into Budapest.
Mr. Kolb: Well things were really serious back then, the Cold War.
Mrs. Schmitt: And I was told – now, Jim, you know that I talk a lot, I made reference to that. Okay, I was told not to talk to anybody on the train. I went from Munich by train into Budapest and my instructions were: “Don’t talk to anybody and don’t take anything to drink from anybody.” Well, when I left Chuck, I’m terrified. I’m a Tennessee hillbilly. I don’t know any foreign language; I know nothing. I had a little book, Hungarian to English, English to Hungarian, and I get in this train car and there are three people in front of me in a seat and two beside, three facing each other, and they are all talking in Hungarian, just all of them talking. And I am leaning out the window telling Chuck goodbye and crying, just crying. So when I pull out, I slump back in my seat, tears are just – I’m scared to death is what I am, told not to talk to anybody, not to take a drink. This man, they’re all looking at me like – they���re saying in Hungarian, “What is wrong?” and I can’t tell them, so I finally get out my little book, “Child studying in Hungary, visit.” And they all go, “Ohh!” All of them are talking about three pages full in answer to that. Then a man brings out a bottle and hands it to me and I take a big swig and then I say, “Oh, I’m not supposed to do that.”
Mr. Kolb: Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
Mrs. Schmitt: They just thought somebody might drug me out here. But anyway, I broke all the rules before I even got out of the train station. Anyway, then we got to the border, Hungarian border, and we were there for hours, and it was a traumatic thing ’cause they came in our car and they opened every suitcase of everybody except mine. They did not bother mine. They had them open and they were bringing everything out to see what the Hungarians were bringing in. They didn’t bother mine, but I was scared to death, and they were out on the wheels of the cars banging each one to see if they sounded like they had anything hidden in them, and it was real scary.
Mr. Kolb: Oppressive sounding.
Mrs. Schmitt: When I pulled into the station at Budapest, I was crying still, I was crying.
Mr. Kolb: And Kathy met you.
Mrs. Schmitt: Kathy met me, and I was crying, crying.
Mr. Kolb: What were you crying for?
Mrs. Schmitt: I don’t know why I was crying.
Mr. Kolb: Just happy to be there.
Mrs. Schmitt: Yeah, then I was happy, relieved and happy.
Mr. Kolb: And then she did make good use of the educational training.
Mrs. Schmitt: I’ll tell you one last thing about Kathy. She’s an excellent music teacher and the repertoire that she picks for the competition is so much substance and greater that anyone else’s. She just returned from the whole state trials or competitions in Frederick, Maryland. She won all superiors by every one of the judges. All mention her repertoire. Her kids were singing in Hungarian.
Mr. Kolb: That’s amazing.
Mrs. Schmitt: She just blew them off the map, and she’s a very tough teacher. Every year, she’ll have different themes, like all this year is “We Can, Too!” And when they came back from the conference, they said, “We Did It!” Kathy said, “Mom, my best job is I’m a motivator.” She said, “I can motivate.” She’s only been at this school two years, and when she went – Cabin John is up between Washington and Maryland, Montgomery County – she was told that no one could replace the last music teacher. Everyone just said “No.” Well, she said, “Mom, I so far replaced him, can’t even remember his name.” I better get off bragging on Kathy, but Kathy is an instrument of God to do what she did. She started playing the piano by ear when she was five. I mean, she was put on the earth for music teacher, handpicked. I do believe that.
Mr. Kolb: I guess you and Chuck have musical backgrounds, but not to the point that –
Mrs. Schmitt: Well, from my background, my mother played by ear, my sister, it missed me but Kathy –
Mr. Kolb: Kathy picked it up.
Mrs. Schmitt: The week we got a piano she came home from Woodland School, she was in Kindergarten and played a tune, and I went in, I was stunned. I said, “Kathy where’d you get that?” She said, “Ms. Carter played it at school today.” And I said, “Well, how did you know how to do it?” She said, “Your fingers know where to go. Don’t yours?” was her question. I said, “No, mine don’t.” And Jeff, all he wanted to do was grow up and buy an axe and knock the piano down. I made him take for two years. They started at the same time. All he wanted to do was chop it up in little pieces.
Mr. Kolb: You were lucky enough to have one child that was unique in that regard. Well, that’s great Toni. You’ve been very interesting and I thank you and you’ve got some wonderful stories.
Mrs. Schmitt: Well I could probably talk for my whole life –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I know.
Mrs. Schmitt: – for hours on each and every – I’ve got so many incidents of the kids – that’s still going – well anyway, the kids say, “Mom, write a book.” But I don’t have time. I play bridge every day. You can turn that off.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that’s fine. Thank you, Toni.
[end of recording]